Some ideas have a hard time getting accepted by mainstream medicine. One of them is the idea that an infection that hides inside lung cells and is difficult to culture might create symptoms reminiscent of asthma. This seems so plausible to us that we have difficulty understanding why physicians wouldn’t want to rule out infection in the course of making an asthma diagnosis. That seems to be what this person experienced.
Q. I read your article about a patient diagnosed with uncontrollable asthma who had a lung infection. I was diagnosed with serious asthma by two pulmonologists and two infectious disease doctors (all from the same medical center).
Mycobacterium Infection from the Start:
My physician daughter insisted that I see a pulmonologist from another center. I did and was diagnosed with a mycobacterium infection. Then I found my old CT scans online and discovered the diagnosis had been mycobacterium infection all along. Go figure!
It took two years on three antibiotics to clear the infection, but now all my symptoms have cleared up and I am healthy.
A. Hard-to-treat asthma has been linked to chronic lung infections such as Mycobacterium or C. pneumoniae. Such infections sometimes require prolonged antibiotic therapy to wipe out the microorganisms triggering the inflammatory response.
The difficulty you had obtaining a diagnosis demonstrates why a second opinion can be so valuable. You can learn more about such lung infections and their treatment in the book by Dr. David Hahn, A Cure for Asthma? What Your Doctor Isn’t Telling You-and Why.
