Part 1 of Chapter Three: Sinusitis – a Portrait, From “acute” to “chronic”

Chapter Three: Sinusitis – a Portrait

Goals:

• To explain how fast “acute” can become “chronic”
• To explain the basic physiology
• To show you how severe it can become – for workaholics

From “acute” to “chronic”

You might have had sinusitis for the first time. There are no reasons that it might come back. Right? But why do so many people get sinusitis so often? There are many researchers in the world to find out, but one important part in the puzzle is the time needed to fully cure an acute sinusitis. It’s not days, but weeks. I don’t want to make any scientific statement so do not ask me how long it takes to fully recover from an acute sinusitis. But let me tell you this: You are better off to be sick and out of the office for two weeks and take a little vacation after this (maybe one week) to get three weeks for some recovery. The sinuses are very sensitive and complex – they need a lot of time to recover from a severe inflammation.

à If you manage to find enough time to recover from an acute sinusitis, chances are that this disease will not come back so quickly. Three days are not enough, trust me.

Get the idea? We all know where this thought leads us to. Look at the image above. It is an exemplified course of sickness and the healthy phases I experienced myself a few years ago. In January, I got really sick with a sinusitis. I used a lot of nasal spray to ease the pain and get rid of it. The spray dried out my sinuses like hell. However, it worked. I recovered within one and a half weeks. Then, end of May, I got the next sinusitis. I inhaled hot water with cineole and used less of the spray. I slowly realized that the smoky office environment I worked in the whole day dried out the tissues in my nose. This happened slowly, so slowly that I had not realized this first. I recovered, but did not feel as fit the following two months. I took only 2 and a half month and I got sick again.

I had never taken 3 or 4 weeks off work to cure this. Instead, I tried to reduce the time off work in order not to look lazy. In the following 5 months, I had 4 episodes of sinusitis, and even when it was gone I felt weak and tired. The truth is, I had never been cured. I realized I was chronically sick and, luckily, was able to quit my job. I found something new in a completely smoke-free environment and I also learned more about the options I had concerning medication: I used Serrapeptase ® Takeda, Gelomyrthol ® Pohl Boskamp and exclusively consulted ORLs instead of incapable general practitioners, who often cannot tell a rhinitis from a severe sinusitis.

What I really want to tell you is that acute phases of sinusitis can lead to chronic conditions that are not obvious to you. Many people fight their way through everyday life and their job while being tiered and pumped out. They sometimes do not even realize they have sinusitis in a chronic state. One sign of chronic sickness for me was that even when I had recovered, I didn’t feel healthy. This had been the red, blinking warning light that signaled to me I had to change the way I worked and lived.  

Kind regards, 

Marcus