Sly Saint
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
“Every virus has a post-viral syndrome,” said Putrino. “In a global pandemic we’re going to have a certain number of patients present with a post-viral syndrome, and shame on us for not being ready.”
Long COVID patients are far from the only ones in this situation. Millions of people suffer from similar chronic symptoms, many of them too debilitated to work a job or even leave their bed. They, too, have been told their symptoms are psychogenic. Those I spoke with recounted how they watched in horror as the first reports of post-COVID began to surface. They saw what was coming, even if the doctors and scientists didn’t.
In 1988, an essay in the British Medical Journal coined the term “heartsink patients” to identify patients who evoke in doctors “an overwhelming mixture of exasperation, defeat and sometimes plain dislike that causes the heart to sink when they consult.”
Among the characteristics associated with heartsink patients are thick clinical records, being female (in the original essay, 22 of those described were women and 6 were men), repeated visits to healthcare providers, and, most importantly, the technical term “medically unexplained symptoms” (MUS).
The classic modern example of medically unexplained symptoms leading to mistaken psychogenic diagnoses is myalgic encephalomyelitis or “chronic fatigue syndrome.” According to the CDC, an estimated 836,000 to 2.5 million Americans have ME/CFS, 90 percent of whom haven’t been diagnosed. ME/CFS is tremendously disabling,
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjp...repared-for-long-haul-covid-patients-symptoms