With 34 years in cardiovascular and pulmonary physical therapy, Dr. Noah Greenspan knows you can’t always see the invisible illnesses and allergy triggers lurking around you. Here’s why he still keeps a KN95 mask on hand for allergy season.
“I’ve been practicing for 34 years,” says board-certified clinical specialist in cardiovascular and pulmonary physical therapy Dr. Noah Greenspan. “In this time of Google, AI, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, so many people are quote ‘experts.’ They’ll hear something and repeat it, and they’ll put it with a fancy picture or a funny meme or a good little reel, and then it becomes repeated and repeated and repeated. Half the time, the information is completely false.”
Greenspan specializes in lung health and knows that allergies and illnesses can play a massive role in lung health. And after working with long-term COVID patients for over six years, he has a very clear perspective about what it means to protect yourself in crowded spaces, high-trigger environments, and everyday situations where you honestly just don’t know what you’re breathing in.
“So, when I’m on the internet, and somebody wants to say to me, ‘Masks don’t protect the wearer,’ it’s like, what do you say to that?”
Although the mask conversation for most of us is usually tied to COVID, the larger point is about invisible exposure. Illness, allergens, crowded rooms, and questions about air quality are all situations where you don’t get the heads up until your body starts reacting to something.
This is why, even five years on from peak pandemic, Greenspan still keeps a KN95 mask on hand.
“I’m going for the KN95 mask, right?” says Greenspan. “The reason being that this is going to protect me, and I’ve worn KN95 masks in trillions of different situations.
“At the pulmonary center, everybody wears a mask. My staff all wear KN95s. Patients have their choice of masks.
“Most choose to use a surgical mask because it’s the most comfortable, and a good kind of rule of thumb is the more comfortable it is, the less protective it is.
Greenspan offers a gentle reminder that even if a space seems ‘safe,’ looks can be deceiving. Just take his practice for example. “My office isn’t even really a clean space all the time because sometimes I’m doing treatments in my office where people are sick, and they’re doing inhalation therapies.”
While Greenspan and medical professionals in general do their best to maintain a safe and sanitary environment, those invisible exposures could always be lurking, even in the cleanest of spaces.
How KN95 masks help protect you
“Air can enter our body in two ways: our nose and our mouth,” he says, so your mask is tackling two major entry points at once. He also mentions that we can’t forget about our eyes and how allergies and illness can enter through there, but luckily, his grandma has some solid advice.
“My grandmother used to have a phrase that she used, and I think it’s Yiddish, but she would say, ‘Don’t potchke your face,’ right? And that means don’t play around with your face. That’s great advice, right? Because in your face, things can enter your mucous membranes through your eyes, through your nose, through your mouth. You were on the subway for 15 minutes holding that pole, and now you have an itch on your nose. You just introduced that all into your nose.”
Where to still wear a KN95 mask
“I go to the theater a lot as of late. Theaters are very tightly packed. I always bring a mask with me whether or not I put it on,” Greenspan says. “You may be sitting next to Typhoid Mary who’s coughing nonstop through the show, and then you’re sitting there like, ‘I wish I had my mask.’
“Next, plane. I’m going to use it all the time. Airport, I’m going to use it all the time because, again, you don’t know who you’re going to come in contact with. Same thing with work. I put it on almost as soon as I get to the pulmonary center, unless I’m in a space that I know for sure is a clean space.
“Especially a place where there’s going to be a lot of people coming from all over — New York City, Broadway. There’s tons of tourists here, and somebody might have gotten off a plane this morning and now they’re at ‘Hamilton.’”
The bottom line though? “Masks are so easy to take, fold up, get an individually wrapped one that you could put in your pocket. It’s like you may not use it, but you have it in case you need to.”
So when those allergies flare up or you are sitting across from Typhoid Mary, you’ll be glad you have an extra layer of protection already queued up.
The whole point: protection is personal
“We all have different thresholds for what we can accept in our bodies, what we can contract, and then what we can fight off,” Greenspan says.
“For me, if I get sick, I don’t work. I can’t work. My team doesn’t work if they get sick. So if you get COVID and you’re sick for a month, you don’t work for a month. You still get paid, right? But for me, it’s not worth it.
“When you’re in healthcare, you’re protecting other people as well. When you have a family, or older parents, grandparents, children, we all have our different levels of immunity based on different situations.
If that’s the case, and there are vulnerable members in your household or people you frequently see, wearing a mask can help shield them from coughs and colds that could have a greater impact on them than they do on you.
“Do you protect yourself? Do you protect others? We all have different motivations for who we protect,” Greenspan says.
