Advair, a combination of Fluticasone and Salmeterol, is a drug used to treat various respiratory complaints including Asthma. I, myself, once took the drug to treat convulsive coughing that was a miserable afterthought of the worst illness of my life, a tenacious case of Pneumonia.

Advair is delivered by a unique inhaler, rather than the usual L-shaped gas based inhaler, Advair uses a disk shaped device that delivers a small dose of powdered medicine into a chamber within the device which is then aspirated through a nozzle. The top half of the disk rotates to reveal and conceal the nozzle.

Somewhere in my house I probably have the Advair device. It was unusual so I kept it. I never thought to disassemble it, which given my tinkersome proclivities is fairly remarkable. Some Internet Guy did think to though and here it is:

View the disassembled Advair device (Via Wikipedia)

On a side note, someone apparently named “Jason Tate” (at least he’s the registrant of the domain name) is running a site called “advairDiskusIsNotSafe.com” ~ does not make any claims that the diskus is not safe but merely states that weight gain is a known possible side effect of the drug. This “gentleman” runs a whole network of these sites, “attacking” (if that’s the word) virtually every major drug Sildenafil (viagraIsNotSafe.com) Esomeprazole (nexiumIsNotSafe.com), even Ibuprofen! (advilIsNot…) as well as a site about webcams in San Francisco.

Its a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad world…