Six days after his initial complaint, the patient returned with worsening symptoms and was admitted to the hospital. No bacterial or viral infections could be found, but the patient was treated with antibiotics anyway as his symptoms suggested that his respiratory distress and other symptoms were due to some sort of infection. The fact that his condition continued to worsen without any notable effect from broad-spectrum antibiotics suggests that perhaps the physicians erred in this assessment, and that the negative results of the many tests for infectious agents administered to the patient were more accurate than the physicians thought. Focusing attentions more immediately on other potential causes and more direct methods of symptom relief, either in addition to or instead of the antibiotic treatment and observation that constituted...

At the point that this was discovered, the patient's respiratory distress had already become quite extreme and, as it turned out, irreversible. More aggressive treatment at the earlier stages rather than a dismissal as a standard case of acquired pneumonia and exacerbated asthma might have led to more conclusive determinations and effective treatments early on.