EC Pulmonology and Respiratory Medicine

For many centuries, acute pneumonia (AP) has been interpreted as a severe inflammatory process, but was not considered as a real threat of infection and disease to others. The ancient postulate that people suffer from pneumonia, and not get infected, determined the principles of working with these patients throughout the foreseeable history of medicine. The situation gradually but radically began to change after the introduction of antibiotics into practice, despite the fact that the epidemiological situation around patients with AP remained the same. The results of the use of antibiotics did not change the basic essence of this nosology, but deprived the etiology of the disease of stable leaders, giving it a labile character, and played an important role in distorting professional ideas about this problem.

The long-term and methodical preparation of many generations of doctors for the leading role of antibiotics in the treatment of AP, quite naturally, focused attention and therapeutic efforts on antimicrobial therapy, assigning the pathogens of the disease a leading role in its development. Such a course of events for many decades has been reflected in the fact that AP, while retaining its former signs known since ancient times, has become classified as an infectious process, and the goal of modern research has turned into an attempt by any means to link and explain the essence of the growing problem with the quality of pathogens. The persistence of many years of efforts to find the key to solving this problem by studying its etiology not only does not give the expected results, but every year leads to further distortion of ideas about its essence, adding new counterarguments against such a strategy.

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