“the dogma was that asthma was a neurological disease—the nervous system sending the wrong signals to the lungs. Then, in the 1950s and ’60s, the idea came along that it is an allergic reaction, and that has pretty much stuck. Even now textbooks say that the way people get asthma is by being exposed to allergens early in life. Basically everything in that theory is wrong. It’s clear now that it is considerably more complicated than that. We now know that half the cases in the world involve allergies, but half are due to something else altogether—to nonallergic mechanisms. We don’t know what
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