Article: The coming battles over long-haul COVID-19 and long-term disability

Sly Saint

Sly Saint

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
As millions of people grapple with COVID-19 infections, the medical community has learned more about the symptoms associated with periods of acute illness and the unpredictable path toward recovery. In this article, I’ll explain why a debilitating condition known as long-haul COVID will likely be one of the biggest insurance claims battlegrounds in the next few years.
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The insurance battleground

Long-haul COVID symptoms can be debilitating and disabling. Some people previously in the workforce have discovered that a return to work is not yet possible after they have exhausted short-term disability benefits and/or no longer qualify for federal programs such as the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) or the Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB).

But many long-term disability insurers have been increasingly giving their insureds the run-around as they apply for these benefits. The reasons for delays or denials often have to do with the novelty of this illness and ongoing discussions within the medical community to define the syndrome’s symptoms or, indeed, to determine whether it is a new pathophysiological syndrome or psychosomatic.

In the personal injury field, sadly, we’ve heard this story before. Countless individuals suffering from a novel or previously little-understood conditions such as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), fibromyalgia, chronic Epstein–Barr virus or post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome have fought for years for medical recognition of their genuine symptoms and resulting disabilities. When the medical community is still establishing the criteria for a condition or syndrome and there is no official diagnosis, insurers may point to a lack of medical consensus or evidence to deny a claim.
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full article here
https://www.thelawyersdaily.ca/arti...r-long-haul-covid-19-and-long-term-disability
 
"psychosomatic"? what would make they think that way? what can be the relationship between psychology and having been infected with a deadly virus and later developing a series of bodily symptoms? It goes even against common sense
 
"The relationship of having been infected with a deadly virus and later developing a series of bodily symptoms" is exactly what a BPS approach is made of, isn't it?

Fear fueled by scary media reports and too much focus on physical symptoms could have made people go crazy after all.
 
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glennthefrog said:
"psychosomatic"? what would make they think that way? what can be the relationship between psychology and having been infected with a deadly virus and later developing a series of bodily symptoms? It goes even against common sense
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They believe that any infection is gone; in fact some of them think that there was never an infection just anxiety about catching a killer virus.

Their theory of ME has been honed to something simple. You get an infection which keeps you ill for a while. You get deconditioned. You try to do something but you find it difficult and painful because your muscles are deconditioned.

Being fearful you now think that you are worse because of the exercise. You avoid exercise. You become more deconditioned until you are very ill in a vicious cycle that can only be broken by CBT to get you to realise you are not really ill and graded exercise that gets you in condition so there is no more symptoms when you do things.

Voila knighthood!

This is spiced up with being sick giving you a reward such as attention (and attention from doctors!) people making a fuss over you and being able to avoid things like meeting people or having to work. Thus the mocking of children and denial of benefits so you don't get a reward of money. Oh and no medical tests because that would make you think you must be sick and no aids for the same reason.
 
insurance companies want the word psychosomatic attached to as many illnesses as possible because it allows them to refuse claims . this leads to greater bonusses for board members and more money for hiring psycho babblers to deny more claims and produce more tripe in support of the "evidence they give in courts or tribunals.
 
alktipping said:
insurance companies want the word psychosomatic attached to as many illnesses as possible because it allows them to refuse claims . this leads to greater bonusses for board members and more money for hiring psycho babblers to deny more claims and produce more tripe in support of the "evidence they give in courts or tribunals.
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I agree. But I've never been clear on why doctors are so happy to go along with this. The number of apparent sadists in the profession is enormous.
 
Sadly, too many people are being sucked in to the lies.

A caring GP has a patient with obvious problems he has never met before so he looks to experts in the condition for advice. He has no reason to believe that they have perverted understanding of the disease so when they say that CBT and GET are curative and that he must not run blood tests because it makes the patient worse he will believe them just as he would a rheumatologist.

When nurses are told to leave food and medication as far away from an ME patient as possible so they will be forced to move many will accept it is the best thing to do. Of course, some are compassionate and don't follow protocol.

Bristol runs courses for police officers where they are told that children must be taken from parents who are emotionally abusing them by keeping them sick. They are left with the belief that these poor children will be bedridden for life if they are left at home. It becomes a moral duty to do it.

There is a coldness in the way we are treated by the people in charge. I feel we are just objects to be used for their own needs regardless of what it means to us.
 
UK:
MetLife records dramatic surge in Long Covid Q3 claims

John Brazier 07 December 2021 • 1 min read
Data from the provider shows Long Covid accounted for 10% of new group income protection claims over the past three months, representing a 250% increase on the previous quarter.

The latest figures from the Office of National Statistics show that around 1.2 million people in private households throughout the UK are self-reporting symptoms of Long Covid persisting for over four weeks as of the end October.
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https://www.covermagazine.co.uk/news/4041706/metlife-records-dramatic-surge-long-covid-q3-claims
 
Mithriel said:
They believe that any infection is gone; in fact some of them think that there was never an infection just anxiety about catching a killer virus.

Their theory of ME has been honed to something simple. You get an infection which keeps you ill for a while. You get deconditioned. You try to do something but you find it difficult and painful because your muscles are deconditioned.

Being fearful you now think that you are worse because of the exercise. You avoid exercise. You become more deconditioned until you are very ill in a vicious cycle that can only be broken by CBT to get you to realise you are not really ill and graded exercise that gets you in condition so there is no more symptoms when you do things.

Voila knighthood!

This is spiced up with being sick giving you a reward such as attention (and attention from doctors!) people making a fuss over you and being able to avoid things like meeting people or having to work. Thus the mocking of children and denial of benefits so you don't get a reward of money. Oh and no medical tests because that would make you think you must be sick and no aids for the same reason.
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That's just so spot on. Brilliant.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I've believed most of the BPS GET/CBT junk for years:banghead:
Spent hundreds £s on various pscho therapies, heart rate monitors, supplements, anti-virals, etc,etc....
None have given me a noticeable improvement.

The only thing that helps me personally (in n= 1 group so no scientific validity),is getting enough horizontal rest time and pacing activities through day/week.
The thing is nobody can make money out of me for these self help strategies.:thumbup:

As a kid I was a competitive swimmer so I guess the addiction to exercise/adrenalin started there.

I read a book by Daniel Liberman called Exercised which describes the medicalisation of exercise.

Very interesting. He described how various tribes, untouched by the modern world, would not dream of exercising.
This seemed to be cos their focus is on not wasting energy since their food supply was not always to be relied on. Great idea.
 
Mithriel said:
They believe that any infection is gone; in fact some of them think that there was never an infection just anxiety about catching a killer virus.
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I'm currently recovering from Covid. I had a positive Lateral Flow test done at home first, then I had a PCR test done that was sent off for testing. I have official emails from the NHS saying that I got a positive PCR result. If I ever need to prove I had Covid I wonder how they will wriggle out of that one.
 
Probably fairly easily; their IT sucks.

At the beginning of October, I booked for a booster on the 16th of October, as I hadn't heard anything about a booster shot being available at home (and was told that the teams doing covid home shots had been disbanded late May).

On the 16th I got the booster, and a scribbled on piece of cardboard to 'prove' it.

A week later I got a letter saying that as I was over 50 I should book for the booster
A week later that I got a letter saying that as I was CEV I should book a booster.

(note the order of that).

Yesterday I got an email saying that they'd noticed I hadn't had a booster, could I please book one now.

NHS IT sucks, 7 weeks (ish), when I was in the system, and it was entered in that I had attended, and yet...they still don't know that I attended.

So, no idea what chance a test result has got ;)
 
Arnie Pye said:
I'm currently recovering from Covid. I had a positive Lateral Flow test done at home first, then I had a PCR test done that was sent off for testing. I have official emails from the NHS saying that I got a positive PCR result. If I ever need to prove I had Covid I wonder how they will wriggle out of that one.
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I am glad you are over the worst of it. I hope you continue to improve.

I cannot prove I had covid in March 2020. Testing was not available and people seem to have forgotten that, which I was not expecting. My antibody test was negative and people don't know that's often the case. I am glad I contacted my GP for help and there is a record of that at the time, but the level of "you probably haven't had it" from (medical) people has been legitimately shocking. I never recovered. Neither did many others. There was no testing. How quickly people forget.
 
Ariel said:
I am glad you are over the worst of it. I hope you continue to improve.

I cannot prove I had covid in March 2020. Testing was not available and people seem to have forgotten that, which I was not expecting. My antibody test was negative and people don't know that's often the case. I am glad I contacted my GP for help and there is a record of that at the time, but the level of "you probably haven't had it" from (medical) people has been legitimately shocking. I never recovered. Neither did many others. There was no testing. How quickly people forget.
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Same same. March 2020 not yet recovered. Solidarity.
 
alktipping said:
insurance companies want the word psychosomatic attached to as many illnesses as possible because it allows them to refuse claims
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Such an odd capitulation. That sentence seems to underline much of the saga and calls back to the infamous photo from the Oxford Malingering and Illness Deception meeting.

The insurance companies ask the medical profession to diagnose "psychosomatic disease", which the medical profession seems only too happy to do. Now the patient has a diagnosis of a real disease (remember kids: mind-body are one).

So how is this simultaneously a real disease of the mind-body unit; but also not a real disease, such that they can deny claims?

Is it because any patient could fake psychosomatic disease so it can never be proven to genuinely exist in that patient?

Or... and stay with me here... is it because the whole concept of psychosomatic disease is unprovable, unfalsifiable and is completely made-up BS?

Suspect the law suits are going to come rolling in.

(I'm sure this has been expressed repeatedly here in the past)
 
Ah, but we have no money to pay lawyers, and they have trillions, and lawyers.

David and Golliath is a fable, not reality.

In reality the people with money, power, and lawyers, win.

This is the way society works.

It's the way it's been engineered to work, since there were 2 people and only one rock.
 
SNT Gatchaman said:
Such an odd capitulation. That sentence seems to underline much of the saga and calls back to the infamous photo from the Oxford Malingering and Illness Deception meeting.

The insurance companies ask the medical profession to diagnose "psychosomatic disease", which the medical profession seems only too happy to do. Now the patient has a diagnosis of a real disease (remember kids: mind-body are one).

So how is this simultaneously a real disease of the mind-body unit; but also not a real disease, such that they can deny claims?

Is it because any patient could fake psychosomatic disease so it can never be proven to genuinely exist in that patient?

Or... and stay with me here... is it because the whole concept of psychosomatic disease is unprovable, unfalsifiable and is completely made-up BS?

Suspect the law suits are going to come rolling in.

(I'm sure this has been expressed repeatedly here in the past)
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Absolutely, why are they quite so keen to stitch up their patients?

Most of us are not in the position to fight legally but I hope they -pandemic so the odds are good- choose to pick on someone with the financial and physical resources to punch back hard and fast enough to really hurt them.
 
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Wonko said:
Ah, but we have no money to pay lawyers, and they have trillions, and lawyers.
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It may be that the current pandemic will provide sufficient numbers of people in similar enough circumstances to make a class action (of the sort that American legal dramas portray, if such exist in the real world) possible.

Though I feel a bit uneasy hoping that sufficient numbers of people with Long Covid, who would also meet an ME/CFS diagnosis, suffer from the failures of their insurers, to enable class actions and create a medical sea change.

The better answer would be an agreed diagnostic biomarker and actual functioning treatments.
 
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