Out Of Breath...
Hi all,
Newly registered, but have been perusing this forum for a good while since before joining the RAF. Just had a quick look at the most recent page of this thread and saw the familiar "Asthma" question had reared its head once more. I’d like to make some points, as I have a little experience with this. It’s a bit long but I feel that there is STILL somehow a bit of ambiguity around this subject!
As Levelling the Land points out, if you have had asthma that is it for you as far as applying to be RAF aircrew goes. None of this "I haven't had an attack since I was aged twelve" or "it was child-hood asthma and I barely needed the inhalers"; if you HAD, it that's IT. If the RAF see any mention of asthma on your history, they WILL NOT accept you. They simply don’t need to; since 1990 we have shrunk from approx. 90,000 to 30,000 and the UK population has increased from 58m to 64m. There is no shortage of medically fit aircrew applicants.
However.
If there are mentions on your medical record of you being prescribed inhalers or mentions of asthma that you simply didn't have, that's where you start getting a little wiggle room.
Story time! Aged 5, I had a chest infection for which I was prescribed the usual blue and brown inhalers. In addition to this, as was the fashion of the day, "asthma" was put down on my records as a potential contributor. So, every few months my prescription for the inhalers was repeated, which I obediently took from my kind GP and then simply put it in a drawer and forgot about it; I managed to rack up a fairly impressive collection of unused inhalers. Naturally, this wasn’t a problem until I finally came to apply to the RAF and was told that due to my “asthma” I couldn’t join. Obviously, I was mortified and did what any red-blooded teenager would do and sought for ways around it! Talking to my parents, they honestly couldn’t recall any asthma like symptoms during my childhood; they’d only followed the GP’s directions and taken the prescription without realising the consequences down the line. Upon approaching my GP for the PPRUNE approved “misdiagnosis” card, I was shot down in flames on two counts: 1. Who was I, a teenager with the ink on my A-Level certificates still wet, to challenge the diagnosis of a qualified doctor with several decades experience? 2. Her nephew had also been medically excluded from the RAF due to migraines, so it was just “one of those things” I had to live with. Not content with this, I managed to track down one of the leading thoracic consultants in the country and after several months of extensive tests and hundreds of pounds in private medical fees I had the result I’d been looking for:
- The wording in my medical history regarding the diagnosis was weak, and, coupled with my non-use of the inhalers didn’t suggest any real reasoning behind it.
- My lungs didn’t have the tell-tale scarring commonly found with past asthma sufferers
- I performed well above the national average during the lung stress tests.
On the basis of this, he was able to give the RAF medical board his opinion that I had been misdiagnosed, which was accepted. Result!
To summarise:
- If you’ve EVER had asthma, that’s it. It doesn’t matter when or if you’ve outgrown it, you CANNOT join the RAF as aircrew.
- If you’ve NEVER had asthma, but were incorrectly diagnosed or prescribed medication you can challenge it. However, the onus is on YOU to prove otherwise and you will not get any costs back, no matter the result.
- If you HAVE had/ do have asthma and you’re reading this thinking you’ll push for the misdiagnosis, STOP! 99% of the time you’ll be caught by the tests and there will be a lot of embarrassment for you and the consultant, and a lot of cash lost by you. On the 1% chance that you slip through the net by a lab mess up or other means, you have just put yourself in a position where you can endanger the lives of you, your crew, the 3-400 potential passengers down the back of your C17/Voyager and whoever else happens to be under you when you pile in. I’m all for chasing dreams, but not at the expense of others’ safety!
Apologies for the long post, but I hope this helps clear a few things up.
BR
4LongHaul