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.

Feeling Breatheless?

Pneumonia is a pretty life impacting disease, and when you’ve got it you’ll know it’s serious.  It starts out with a dry cough and progresses to a wet cough, usually a productive, green-yellow, wet cough which can even have an odor to it.  Breathlessness is the big symptom.  Sometimes people don’t seek help until they’re short of breath.  They can’t get enough oxygen because the lung tissues are compromised.  They swell because of all the white blood cells moving in to combat the infection.  The membrane gets thicker in the lung and the oxygen can’t get across the membrane.  There’s one thin cell wall between the oxygen-laden air you breathe in and the red blood cells that pick it up which gets so broad that the oxygen can’t get across there to get picked up by the red blood cells.  The breathlessness is nothing mystical.  It’s just a physical distance that’s created by the swelling.

People lose their appetite during a pneumonia bout because when they don’t have enough oxygen their body knows that they don’t need to be doing anything extra like walking or doing this or that.  At the same time digesting food takes a lot of energy and a lot of blood flow to go down there and take all the enzymes and to carry the food away and to process the food in the liver.  Loss of appetite is a hallmark of pneumonia.

Then, of course, you can get aches and pains all over.  Frequently pleurisy can develop when you get pneumonia – a little fluid between the lung wall and chest wall.  That will be significant pain.  That’s not a little bit of pain, that’s sharp pain.  Usually every breath you take you know about it.  

Complications include pleurisy as well as breathing difficulties that can become so acute that you need to be hospitalized with oxygen.  Certainly if I could I’d want to do the oxygen at home.  Hey, we know that up to 18% of the people who die in the hospital die of pneumonia.  I don’t want to go there, right?  You might get another infection on top of it such as septicemia, where these bacteria wind up in the bloodstream.  The lungs are extremely thin.  They are one cell thick and a lot of times that’s a very thin cell that’s kind of spread out where there’s no nucleus or anything.  But the cell gets real thin there.  It’s fairly easy for bacteria to get into the bloodstream from the lungs.  When you’ve got bacteria circulating in the blood then you’ve got a serious life-threatening issue right then.  

Of course, I’m not advocating that someone not go to the hospital if they’re in need for medical attention.  But if all you’re doing at the hospital is sitting in a bed receiving oxygen, that could be something you can do at home and not worry about the increased risk of bacterial infections you might find at a hospital. 

We’ll talk about treatments for pneumonia next time.

Drowning Alive

As I normally do when I begin a talk about a particular health concern, I like to begin by talking about how relevant this concern is by listing a number of statistics that show the impact of the subject at hand. In this case I’m going to talk about pneumonia.  Many of us have had pneumonia in our lives.  Over 1% of the population every year has pneumonia.  That’s pretty big for a disease that can impact life pretty harshly.  That’s almost as common as getting a cold.  In the general population a little over one out of 100 people every year gets pneumonia.  It’s the fifth leading cause of death; 65,000 people a year die from pneumonia.  It’s the 8^th cause of death if you are in a hospital.  The economic cost is about $40 billion a year.  

It’s interesting to see how the medical community divides up pneumonia.  You would think they would divide it by bacteria, and viruses.  Instead they divided it up into hospital-acquired pneumonia and community-based pneumonia.  You’ve got to know there’s a problem in our hospitals if they are dividing diseases according to whether you got them in the hospital or you got it at home or out in the community.  That’s just a little reality check there.

There are different types of pneumonia according to the normal categories of bacterial, viral, fungal, and inflammatory pneumonias.  We talked a little last week about bronchitis.  That’s where that type of pneumonia would begin.  

In the viral category you have flu which we’re all familiar with.  There are two categories of people that pneumonia is really dangerous for: infants and folks over 65.  If you look at that, probably the danger for those over 65 is influenza.  If you’re talking about an infant it’s a whole different category.  Respiratory seneschal virus and other childhood viruses, even chickenpox, can become pneumonia and childhood diseases like measles.  But RSV  is certainly the biggest one among children.

Almost always, it’s a standard in medicine that we should not put people on antibiotics who get a viral infection.  However, pneumonia is probably the perennial disease that gets treated, day in and day out, with an antibiotic because if you’ve already got pneumonia your lungs are already significantly compromised.  Even if it did start with a virus, there are hundreds of different kinds of bacteria in our lungs already as part of the normal bacteria.  One of those is soon going to take over because your lungs are immuno-compromised from using up your immune system fighting the viral particles there.  Sooner or later if you have a viral pneumonia you’re probably going to come down with a subsequent bacterial pneumonia.  So it’s pretty standard operating procedure in medicine, certainly if you’re admitted or if you are out-patient, if you get the diagnosis of pneumonia to go ahead and start you on a antibiotic.  

Doctor’s are trying to back off of antibiotics because we’re getting all these MRS’s (methicillin resistant bacteria).  These bacteria are smart little rascals.  They can even transfer knowledge of immunity or resistance toward antibiotics between themselves.  You may have gotten an antibiotic and then you sneeze or kiss or share some of your bacteria with somebody else, and the bacteria you gave to someone else can transfer the knowledge of resistance to that bacteria to your bacteria.  So these are not just dumb little bugs multiplying out there that we’re dealing with.  There is certainly some intelligence and knowledge that they swap among themselves.  

Certainly there are atypical pneumonias like Legionnaires' disease.  Back in 1976 a bunch of people came down with an infection, pneumonia, at the head table right under an air-conditioning vent at a American Legion conference in Philadelphia.  That’s how the bacteria got its name.  Six out of 8 of those people at the head table died.  Other people died and a lot got really sick from pneumonia from that bacteria which was in an air-conditioning system.  Other people have died since that happened.

You probably heard on the news in 2003 about SARS, acute respiratory syndrome.  Again, that’s viral.  Then there are other bugs such as TB.  It is still out there and it’s making a comeback.  Certainly fungi can cause pneumonia.  Funguses are much more important if you consider a person who is getting drugs for cancer treatment or an AIDS patient, someone whose immune system is compromised.  Those are the people you really watch out for with fungal infection.

Then there are physical ways you can get pneumonia.  If you were to breathe in some caustic chemicals with a lot of alkali or acid in it that could burn your lungs. You might also aspirate some food and the bacteria that was in the food or the bacteria in your lungs could begin to grow. The immune system doesn’t just fight bacteria and infection.  It also takes care of damaged tissue and cleans up the debris and lays down new tissue and does repairs. While your immune system is mopping up all the damage from the aspirated food it has to be able to take care of any bacterial infection as well.  The immune system is a multi-tasking genius that our Creator designed in our bodies. 

Next time I’ll talk a little about what pneumonia looks like and then we’ll deal with the treatments.