Treating Pneumonia

Before we continue our talk about pnuemonia, first I’ll cover (and re-cover) a few important basics about the disease.

How do you get pneumonia? Well, if it’s community acquired your immune system may be already compromised a little bit. We know what causes that. It’s called stress. I’ve already mentioned in my previous posts that age is a factor. Smoking and drinking are certainly issues there. Heart disease, lung disease such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or emphysema can be factors. Finally, poor health, AIDS and chemotherapy, basically people whose immune system is damaged can have a higher risk of pneumonia.

If you’re a hospital patient and you’ve received gaseous anesthesia (which almost all anesthesia has gasses involved with it these days) that just hammers your immune response. It drives your immune response into the ground. Then, you’re probably having a surgical procedure. Remember, the body can’t only fight infection, it’s having to repair all that surgical damage. So the immune system is, by nature of the procedure, compromised when you’ve had a surgery and gaseous anesthesia. That’s probably one of the reasons that we have a problem with pneumonia in the hospitals. Then, of course, the bacteria in the hospitals have all been talking to each other and remember so they can communicate a resistance to an antibiotic. You can begin to see that the problem can really snowball in a hospital setting.

How is it diagnosed? Your history and a stethoscope with trained ears can usually make the diagnosis. If the doctor is not sure or they need to help pay for the X-ray machine or they want to be totally confident for everybody, they can do an X-ray, and certainly blood cultures may be appropriate to check for circulating bacteria in the blood at some point.

For treatment, have plenty of fluids and appropriate pain medicine for the pain. Again, as I mentioned earlier antibiotics are a cornerstone for treatment by standard medicine.

Naturopathically, probably the number one important things are Vitamin C followed closely by fresh garlic. Cayanne pepper is thought to be important as well as vitamin A, and of course some other immune stimulants: echinacea, shitake, beta 1-3 glucan, uva ursa, una de gato (otherwise known as Cats’ claw), jatobá, and alfalfa. These are a number of things that can be beneficial in the natural arena and I would certainly encourage them.

Most importantly: how not to get pneumonia. If it’s hospital pneumonia, don’t go to the hospital if you can help it. As far as community based pneumonia, number 1, get out of stress. So much of what I talk about in terms of disease is so directly linked to stress.

The natural things we mentioned, probably garlic and good doses of vitamin C and zinc are your greatest preventative medicines there. Again, staying out of stress, living life in love and integrity and forgiveness, and a well-rounded diet of supplements will go a long way in preventing most diseases, but especially pneumonia.