Bush The core common symptoms of respiratory diseases are cough, sputum, wheezing, and chest pain. However, because the respiratory tract spans a large distance from the nose and throat to the trachea and lungs, the details of problems in different locations and different triggers are actually very different.
Last week, I just met a 16-year-old girl in the clinic. She coughed violently as soon as she went out in the cold wind after the fall. She also had an itchy nose and constant runny nose. She took cold medicine at home for almost half a month, but she didn't feel any better. When she came to check, she found that it was an upper airway hyperresponsiveness induced by allergic rhinitis, which is a typical upper respiratory tract problem. Generally speaking, most upper respiratory tract lesions will cause discomfort related to the mouth, nose and throat. For example, pharyngitis will cause dryness and itchiness in the throat and a foreign body sensation. Tonsillitis will cause pain when swallowing. Virus infections such as influenza will cause a continuous fever of more than 39 degrees and muscle aches all over the body, which is completely different from the fatigue of a common cold.
If the problem is deeper in the lower respiratory tract, that is, the trachea, bronchi, or even lung tissue, the symptoms will be much more severe. I recently followed up with an old man with a 20-year history of chronic bronchitis. He gets sick every winter. He vomits yellow pus when he coughs. His home is only 50 meters away from the entrance of the community. He has to rest two or three times in the middle. When he wheezes, his chest feels like a broken bellows. He wheezes. In severe cases, he even lies down. If the inflammation reaches the pleura, there will be needle-like chest pain, and the pain will suddenly worsen when you take a deep breath or cough. Like lobar pneumonia caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae infection, you will even cough up rust-colored sputum, and the fever will make you unconscious.
There is a saying on the Internet that as long as the cough lasts for more than two weeks, it is pneumonia. Some people assume that as long as the cough lasts for a long time, it is pharyngitis. They eat throat lozenges and drink soothing herbal tea at home. In fact, both of these opinions are a bit one-sided. Clinically, about one-third of chronic coughs have nothing to do with pharyngitis, such as cough variant asthma, gastroesophageal reflux that irritates the throat, and even the side effects of some antihypertensive drugs can cause long-term coughs. I once met an aunt who had been suffering from dry cough after taking antihypertensive drugs for half a year. She stopped taking the medicine and switched to another type. Within two weeks, the cough was completely gone without even prescribing more medicine. If your cough has not improved for more than two weeks, don't make blind guesses or carry on. Go to the hospital to take a chest X-ray and do a lung function test, and you can basically pinpoint the cause.
