Publish or the science perishes – A clarion call for research and publication in the midst of an explosion of interventional pulmonology in India

The era has come to leave an Indian IP imprint in the sands of time" Interventional Pulmonology (IP) in India over the last 15 years has exploded, with centers cropping all over the country, including in 2nd and 3rd tier cities.It reflects the clinical need, furthering of the science, the minientrepreneurship of the practitioners, and has been one of the most exciting parts of the growth of Pulmonology in the last 1.5 decades.It also heralded the entry of Pulmonary Medicine into an operative/surgical arena, and greatly expanded our role as both high-end diagnosticians and impactful minimally-invasive therapeutic practitioners.A lot of this explosive growth has been related to the advances and meeting the needs in other rapidly progressing fields of medicine -Oncology, Critical care, Rheumatology, with immunosuppression being a common thread leading to Pulmonary pathology .The medical ecosystem globally, with India rapidly catching up, was clamouring for 'precision diagnosis-based therapy' and an overwhelming need to accurately distinguish infection, inflammation and malignancy -'customised medicine.'The term 'targeted therapy' had come to center stage, with medications and modalities made for specific targets.IP moved rapidly from the 'new kid in the block' to the 'showstopper' for obtaining pulmonary tissue, not only make a diagnosis, but also meet the need for molecular analysis, benign or malignant.Two pivotal advances in the field were EBUS and pleuroscopy, windows into the mediastinal lymph node and into the pleura.Both have a shallow learning curve, are comfortable for the patient, integrated well into the clinical course and provided a wealth of information.EBUS and pleuroscopy had a meteoric rise in India.There is scant data present in the public space on EBUS scopes and procedure numbers, but personal communication with industry leaders mentions that there are roughly 450-500 EBUS scopes in India with close to 15000+ EBUS procedures being done in the country, which is tremendous considering the fact that the first EBUS came in 2008 in Coimbatore.It is difficult to estimate the number of pleuroscopes, but more than 250 semi-rigid pleuroscopes are there in the country, not counting rigid thoracoscopes and refurbished scopes.