Give Me What I Want and I Will Go Away Who has never had a cough? I bet no one can raise their paw. We encounter this in dispensary all the time. But chronic cough— 1 that lasts at least eight weeks — can exist difficult for patients to deal with and difficult for doctors to figure out. In the October 20, 2016 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine , lung experts describe a step-past-step approach doctors can use to help treat patients with chronic cough. About often a prolonged cough is due to one of the "usual suspects." But when it'southward not, nosotros have a long list of increasingly rarer conditions that we should run through and rule out. If it isn't due to whatever of those , experts now recognize that the culprit may be overactive nerves that cause an exaggerated coughing response to certain triggers. The "usual suspects" that may be behind a chronic coughing