After the introduction of antibiotics into widespread practice, the treatment of patients with acute pneumonia (AP) focused on the etiotropic direction. The centuries-old experience of helping with this disease was simply discarded without preliminary studies and objective tests. The loss of effectiveness of antibiotics increasingly clearly reveals conceptual misconceptions in the assessment of the nature of AP, which arose as a result of a re-evaluation of the role of antimicrobial treatment. The current situation in solving the problem of AP requires an objective assessment of the previous experience of medicine in this field with the identification of areas that deserve attention. The first results of such work have already been obtained and have convincingly shown the prospects for its continuation