May is Asthma Awareness Month, This month, we’d like to raise awareness that asthma might be linked to lurking lung infection that can be tricky to diagnose. Eradicating the infection could lead to an asthma cure for some patients.
Asthma is a chronic disease that can be quite debilitating or even life threatening if it does not respond well to the usual anti-inflammatory inhaled treatments. It is usually considered to have its origins in an allergic reaction, and patients or their parents are well advised to find and eliminate asthma triggers in the home environment. There are some cases of asthma that might be triggered by lung infection with C. pneumoniae or M. pneumoniae.
Q. I suffer with asthma, so I was excited to read on your website that this condition might be caused by a chronic lung infection. I took the article to my family doctor and my pulmonary specialist.
They both refused to consider it and said it was a bogus claim. What they are prescribing isn’t helping. What can a patient do?
A. The concept that hard-to-treat asthma cases could be linked to infection is news to many health professionals. Nevertheless, there is good scientific evidence to support this idea (PLoS One, online, April 22, 2015; Current Allergy and Asthma Reports, Dec., 2013).
The book, A Cure for Asthma? What Your Doctor Isn’t Telling You and Why, by David Hahn, MD, MS, provides the kind of information your physicians should find compelling. Dr. Hahn has successfully used the antibiotic azithromycin (Zithromax, Z-Pak) to treat patients with sudden-onset asthma that is not responding to the usual therapies. In many cases, this led to a complete disappearance of symptoms.
He offers details on the protocol in his book, and we hope that health care providers will be willing to consider the evidence and try this approach for selected patients who, like you, are not responding well to the usual treatments. You can find it on our site or at Amazon.com. We were so impressed with Dr. Hahn’s track record that we published the book (People’s Pharmacy Press).
