Week 3: Summer Immersion

 This is Ruoxin, who shadows Dr. Crystal. This week, we saw one patient with pulmonary fibrosis. This is a chronic lung disease which is caused by damaged lung tissue. Except for some known lung damage histories or known pulmonary gene deficiency, it is hard to find out the problems causing it. It is important to do constant medical examination over years to maintain a functional state of lung. This patient comes with a long medical records because he has been seeing Dr. Crystal for over 15 years. With a good life style and necessary medicines, he seems to maintain good lung function. However, this disease is kind of irreversible. So when I got the chance to use stethoscope to hear his breathing, there were still clear cracklings, which were some short explosive sounds,  during each exhalation. Also, the patient had to be careful with strong movements in case of the short breathe. Therefore, it leads me to think if there is anyway that can help the lung tissue recover. For example, deliver some tissue growth factors exactly to the lung and promote the tissue recovery. However, whether the scarred regions will be affected by these growth factors or not is undetermined. There are some papers speculate that the persistent interstitial inflammation is the main cause of fibrosis. Probably it would be important to fix the inflammation problem first before inducing tissue growth. Also, some papers show that some growth factors might even make the fibrosis worse based on different phenotypes. Many factors should be considered and fully investigated.