BPS attempts at psychologizing Long Covid

https://twitter.com/user/status/1470861918663491591

 

Editorial in a Swedish newspaper, written by a doctor, based on an infamous lecture by psychiatrist Åsa Kadowaki (who has long covid).

Kajsa Dovstad: Tänk om terapi är bästa medicinen vid postcovid
https://www.gp.se/ledare/tänk-om-terapi-är-bästa-medicinen-vid-postcovid-1.61482362

Google Translate, English

 

Long Covid has exposed how medicine truly has no clue how to deal with illness, has genuinely built no understanding of it whatsoever. Either the patient gets better or dies, nothing else is understood, does not compute. Illness is this impossible-to-understand thing on which the serious work has yet to begin, but is always obstructed because blah-blah mind-body blah-blah. Literally half the job and it's no better than in the days of Hippocrates himself, possibly worse. Which is also the case of complex concepts like justice and fairness, but still.

If only this revelation mattered, instead of reinforcing the very problem that caused it in the first place. It's like watching a metaphorical sausage factory except it's way more gory and nauseating. I'm borderline about to find a reason to survive this only to bring this whole broken ass-system down and fix it. Because I've never felt more intense hopelessness than seeing medicine do its thing and flailing and failing all the way, with participation trophies and all. It's truly revolting.

 

Yes. I, along with many others I'm sure, would be fearful if I or my loved ones had to go into hospital for any reason, given the risks of contracting Covid whilst in there. And yet so many NHS staff are putting themselves at risk voluntarily day after day, and now year after year, knowing the risks they face. No matter how good the precautions may be they can never be perfect, so constant exposure inevitably means the risks are still relatively high for them - and they must know it.

 

Those things are not incompatible. Not understanding something and working very hard at it, the wrong way, is pretty much the problem, it's pretty much the whole work hard vs work smart thing. But it remains that when all medicine has to work with is symptoms, there's just paralysis when the usual tools fail. The usual tools sometimes work, here they all fail. Same as with us.

Illness is subjective. Medicine wants objective things to work with, it just can't accept the gap between those, the one where we are still trapped. This hasn't changed, there is still basically no understanding of what illness is, because it's an experience other people have. This still needs to change, it hasn't even begun yet. Long Covid is the test of that, the gauge. It hasn't shifted from red to green yet. I will be ecstatic when that happens, but I won't pretend to see something that isn't there.

 

Was reading through this (also posted elsewhere)
https://www.kqed.org/news/11899845/...-explain-symptoms-and-answer-common-questions

This is from a neurologist now training to be a psychiatrist at University of California, San Francisco

Always worried when people say they are very humble, usually not. Why would she even bring up humility except seeing medicine from an exhalted position and patients as objects. “I can’t imagine” - means you can imagine and actually do think it is a primary psych illness. Acknowledges the inflammatory markers etc, then ignores them, so confirms to the audience it is psychosomatic.

“Ailing emotional response” what sort of group speak is this? Never heard this term before. Is this some new BPS term for “sickness behaviour” somewhat sanitised but still offensive? Anxiety and depression is common in the general population. No awareness that being ill makes you feel anxious about the future/work etc.

 

https://twitter.com/i/events/1474032817101180930
This was trending on Twitter/one of the items highlighted by Twitter. I can't bring myself to read the article at the moment.

 

Humble One.

Have you come for us?

Sacrifice. You make us.

Capitalise. Make us suspect.

Capture. Only injured and sick.

Explain. Our unfitness for relationship with our own bodies

Only you. May know us now.

Extract. Information from us.

Consume. Our desire to live.

Cannibalise. Feast on our flesh.

We are dust we are dirt.

You, are not a person of interest.

Too trite, too tiresome, too much of a bore.

The net of your attention, tightens around your subjects.

No one watches.

The Humble One un-humbled.

 

Merged thread

Negative comments about ME/CFS, Fibromyalgia, Long Covid on the Tucker Carlson Tonight show on Fox on Jan 5

Someone posted this as a comment on my Instagram account recently.

I hadn’t heard this but looks like there were very inappropriate comments on #LongCovid, #ChronicFatigueSyndrome, #Fibromyalgia, etc. on the Tucker Carlson Tonight show on Fox on Jan 5

 

(Certainly not a recommendation)
Somebody has sent me a link to the 4-minute segment:
"Tucker Carlson Tonight 1-5-22 Alex Berenson"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5Ky51SlIbM

 

It is best not to be involved with this network. They are not the news. They could make it even worse for us and they will never apologize.

 

FOX News is trash TV.

 

The Atlantic.

April 2021:

'The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man'
'In a crowded field of wrongness, one person stands out: Alex Berenson.'

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-wrongest-man/618475/

 

Tucker Carlson is all about manufactured culture wars and inciting people to rage with lies, half-lies and twisted facts.

I don't want to insult those who watch his show, so I won't say more about the folly of expecting him to do better, but this is probably a wake up call to those who watched his show.

There's one thing I will say about Carlson: he's relatively consistent. He's usually equally wrong, and badly so, about everything.

 

Everything in America is political — unfortunately long Covid will likely become part of the right v left culture war. This is way beyond our control, obvi. The country is tearing itself apart.

Their fear of “welfare for the rest of their lives” is a common GOP talking point and bullshit based on the system in place. In the US there are two types of payments, Social security disability insurance (SSDI) which is not welfare, it’s an insurance program that all workers pay into during their working lives and pays out based on the amount YOU have paid in. The only welfare program is SSI, and it is a pittance and based on recipients proving they are absolutely poverty stricken w almost no assets. The US is far from introducing UBI, especially given how inflation has taken off largely from the pandemic payments made to all citizens earning under a certain amount.

 

Who cares what Tucker Carlson says. Responding in a massive group so that this sort of stuff gets even more coverage is the worst way to go about it imo.