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[00:00.68] The real beauty of inhalers is how they get these medications into your lungs.

[00:05.20] They work by suspending, or aerosolizing, medications into the air to be easily inhaled.

[00:10.78] Each type of inhaler does this in a slightly different way.

[00:13.70] Dry powder inhalers require a person to breathe in to aerosolize a powder medication.

[00:19.55] Nebulizers, on the other hand, use either ultrasonic vibrations or compressed air to turn liquid medication into a mist.

[00:26.72] The pressurized metered-dose inhaler works a lot like hairspray.

[00:30.97] This medicine is dissolved in a fluid called a propellant, and it's under high pressure.

[00:35.48] This causes the fluid and medication mixture to shoot out in a fast-moving mist.

[00:40.00] But this mist can sometimes be hard to coordinate with breathing.

[00:43.45] So there’s one more device, called a soft mist inhaler, that administers doses at lower speeds, without the use of a propellant.

[00:50.89] Asthma and COPD each affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide each year.

[00:55.94] But thanks to inhalers, what once kept Proust confined to a cork-lined room, can now be treated in a few short puffs.