[_zoltan_]

they didn't give in, but I actually checked hospital internal guidelines for doctors, and it states 3 weeks.

They could have done some more tests or whatever, as it was maybe the worst lung issue I've had and I was really miserable. I knew that antibiotics would help, and they did. I sourced them myself.

You could say lucky guess, but after I complained to my health insurer about the bad doctor's visit, they covered the cost fully without any dispute, so they must have agreed with me with at least about maybe running some more tests...

[gus_massa]

If it was "only" [1] a viral disease, it should dissapear even without antibiotics after a week or two. So perhaps your body solved the problem alone, while you took antibiotics that had no effect.

This is a real posibility and is a real problem to test how useful the medicines are. So all serious studies use a control group [2] to compare the rate of spontanous healing with the rate of healing with the antibiotic.

[1] Some virus are very nasty and can kill you. People confuse the common cold andd the flu, but usualy the flu is much worse.

[2] Preferabely a preregistered double blind randomized control group, becuse there are a lot of other problem that can cause a false result.