HOW DO YOU COUGH?

Cough has a wide variety that can make a major difference for the patient

As if one reason weren't enough,  

Too many things can make you cough.  

Including those (it is a fact!)  

Only doctors can detect.

This question is not funny at all. A common condition, cough, has a wide variety that can make a major difference for the patient.  

Serious types of cough 

An X-ray or a CT scan helps precisely identify an afflicted area in the lungs or rule out serious illness.  

Take chronic (lasting longer than 3 weeks) dry cough attacks combined with profuse nighttime perspiration and weight loss. Given these symptoms, doctors should first rule out tuberculosis and cancer. The former is currently rather rare, yet the chance of it should not be ignored. Cancer, on the other hand, is pretty common. If the doctor suggests an X-ray test, have it. Better safe than sorry! An X-ray or a CT scan can precisely identify an afflicted area in the lungs or rule out the possibility of serious illness.  

You can’t hide love or a bad cough. 

A Latin proverb  

Excruciating cough, combined with troubled breathing, fever, and chest pain, points to pneumonia. This disease is treated with antibiotics. Make sure you finish the full course; otherwise, the surviving bacteria (those with the greatest resistance to the drug) will proliferate and come back with a vengeance.  

Children and occasionally adults may suffer from whooping cough, which may lead to vomiting. Whooping cough is a dangerous disease that is fairly resistant to antibiotics. Fortunately, it may be easily prevented by mandatory vaccination for children. Parents who deprive their kids of vaccination make them vulnerable to a host of deadly diseases, including whooping cough.  

Chronic coughing 

Two more types of cough should be discussed before we move on to the most common and the least dangerous variety. First, smokers suffer from the wet “early morning cough”, producing a lot of mucus. Not surprisingly, this cough disappears in a month or two after the smoker quits.  

Nicotine converts this carpet into slippery linoleum, so all the dirt and the mucus fall to the bottom of the bronchus to be coughed out in the morning. 

What happens is that nicotine has a toxic effect on the cilia, those tiny hair-like structures that line your respiratory tract. The cilia form a sort of carpet pile that captures dust and germs to eject them later with mucus.  Nicotine converts this carpet into slippery linoleum, so all the dirt and the mucus settle at the bottom of the bronchi to be coughed out in the morning. This is why smokers’ lungs are so susceptible to infections and malignant tumors.  

The last type of chronic cough, accompanied by a whistling sound and shortness of breath, is due to allergies or bronchial asthma. The bronchi, contracted by swelling and spasms, occasionally get blocked with mucus – hence the whistling sounds and asphyxia. This condition calls for aggressive treatment. Note that asthma sufferers need not have any fear of steroid inhalers. American researchers have established that such inhalers are perfectly safe.  

Post-cold cough 

This is the most common kind of coughing. Simple virus coughing usually goes away with the common cold or in a couple of days. Sometimes, however, the cold would be gone, but coughing would stay. During the day, your throat would just tickle now and then. Once you go to bed, however, the real onslaught will start. A deep and strong cough will mean a sleepless night before reporting to work – and so it goes on for a week or two. Even a second round of antibiotics does not help. What on earth is happening? And what can you do about it?  

– You know, I don’t like your coughing.  

– Sorry, doctor, but I can’t do it any better.  

Persistent coughing after a common cold is caused by inflammation of the paranasal sinuses, which warm up and humidify the inhaled air. 

I have a surprising answer: treat your nose rather than your throat. The reason for persistent coughing after a common cold is chronic sinusitis, the inflammation of paranasal sinuses that warm up and humidify the inhaled air.  After you have had a cold, your sinuses often produce an excessive amount of mucus that leaks from the nose to the throat when you go to bed.  As you inhale, the incoming air pulverizes this mucus, generating the persistent tickling in the throat that cannot be coughed away. To complicate matters further, the cough center in this scenario continually gets overexcited, which stalls the recovery process.

Any efficient treatment should address the root cause of the disease. So start with the nose, even if it is not runny anymore. Let me remind you: use Saline Nasal Spray every hour or two. A weak saline solution moisturizes nasal membranes, alleviates inflammation, and stops the secretion of excessive mucus by the sinuses. Your cough will be gone in two or three days.  

If the disease has had enough time to upset the cough center in the nervous system, Robitussin DM may be a great help. One of its ingredients softens and liquefies mucus, the other one (DM) calms down the cough center. Take 10 ml of this elixir every four hours (the package comes complete with a measuring glass) with lots of liquid. If, for fear of “poisoning”, you take the drug in smaller doses or less frequently, better not to bother using it at all. As we know from chemistry, the concentration of reagents should be sufficiently high for a reaction to proceed. This is even more critical in medicine.

Remember that lower doses of medication reduce its efficiency, while all the side effects are still there.  

If these simple remedies do not help, chronic coughing may be exacerbated by an allergic component that causes bronchial spasms, an asthma-like constriction of the respiratory tract. Ask your doctor to recommend an inhaler to dilate the bronchi.  Sometimes, a few puffs would terminate severe coughing that had lasted for weeks. At this point, however, there is no more room for self-treatment: you need the professional skills and experience of your physician.  

In any event, persistent coughing is a grave symptom that should never be ignored.

Once you identify its cause, you will be able to recover without any dire consequences.

I wish you good luck and a victory over your cough! 

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