The Patient With ‘Too Many Infections’

Abstract

Perhaps the most common complaints in the primary care physician’s office are related to the common cold. The miseries induced by the common cold virus prompt patients afflicted to seek medical care with expectations of relief prompted by the fact that physicians can successfully transplant hearts, cure cancer, and heal a number of other more severe maladies. Thus, expectations are perhaps unrealistically high for relief of the less threatening and more mundane miseries associated with upper respiratory tract infections. This fact, coupled with the frequency of occurrence of such infections, makes the “cold season” (usually stretching from late October until mid-May) one of the busiest for all primary care physicians and allergists/immunologists as well. It is of course imperative to be able to distinguish those recurrent infections which are benign from those which represent a distinct immunological deficiency syndrome. The nature of the infection is key not only to making this distinction but also in establishing the type of immunological abnormality.