What is a "peak flow" meter?
A peak flow meter is really a dandy little device. I pass out peak flow meters to patients constantly. It's a little plastic gadget that they can take home with them, and they open it up and unfold it and it has a little slider on it. It reminds me of going to the fair ground, where you take a hammer and you pound it down and the ball goes up has high as it can go based on how hard you hit the device at the bottom that will eject the device up the scale. Well, a peak flow meter requires you to take a deep breath and you punch it, and you want to get the peak flow, the fastest you can, to run the slider up as far as it will go. These devices are simple, they are cheap, but they will give you a enormous amount of data. This is especially the case with asthmatics, where the data from taking a peak flow meter reading will tell you that you're about to get an attack of asthma. It can be predictive of an oncoming attack, so you can increase your medications as you need to. What we try and do is get the patient to develop their personal best. That term means how far they can push that little slider up when they take a deep breath, and they exhale forcefully into it. It's not a matter of how long you inhale, its that first punch and you really get it. You want to bounce that thing as far down the scale as you possibly can. Then, you set some limits back from that, which will tell you whether you're starting to have an attack or not. It's a very, very nice, cheap inexpensive way to do home pulmonary function testing.
