As knowledge of asthma increases, it becomes more and more clear that the wheezy breathing is merely a symptom. The important part of the treatment must be to find and remove the cause. What good are drugs if the patient is going to lose all his symptoms within a few hours after moving to the clean environment of the hospital or even to another house, or if his asthma will clear as soon as the cat or the dog or perhaps the kapok mattress is eliminated? However, such a simple happy outcome occurs only in the simple "textbook" cases, which comprise only a fraction of the total number. The great number of patients must have drugs of some sort for relief of real distress, and they may need other drugs for the treatment of the underlying causes of the asthma. DRUGS FOR RELIEF Drugs for relief are widely used and