It weakened it because it will be scientifically untenable as a massive influx of patients (with a clear pathogen at the starting point of their illness) that gets studied while simultaneously research into ME, Lyme, MS, Alzheimer etc. is bringing up overlapping finds as well, exposes pm for the sham it is. Historically one of the key things that pulls diseases from the psychosomatic clutches is understanding the actual physical mechanism and treatment. It's still a wait, but I expect the coming years to see various research finds pulled together in a clear picture, and to bring treatments that, if not a cure, do bring improvement, and I think there's a good chance Long Covid will accelerate that process. Combine that with a bigger spotlight on psychosomatic medicine's claims and writings, patients having better access to science and connections, and a better understanding of how science denial works, and it's theoretically difficult to see how a simplistic and badly substantiated view, that looks suspiciously much like disableism wearing a glossy pseudo-scientific coat, stays upright. And indeed, like Redfox explains in
post #3, you can see the shift happening that scientists, media and journals are picking up on the gaping discrepancy between simplistic psychosomatic theory for Long Covid and scientific and lived reality.
BUT
it also looks like Long Covid has been a big present for the movement. It arrived exactly at the right time: when the foundation their empire is built on (ME/CS) was starting to get pulled away from them, just when they were accelerating the move to expland their influence even further, to
all medical disease. Also, these times are ideal for them: we live in a post truth era, which makes them a fish in water as they have already been doing it since decades before. A need for governments and government-affiliated health care institutes to avoid accountability for the effects of letting Sars-Cov-2 continuously spread mostly unhindered through the population, and for health insurance companies to avoid having to spend money on a wave of new patients, makes psychosomatic explanations extra attractive, and that is on top of psychosomatics already having been heavily and deliberately woven into medical health care to serve financial interests.
And then there's indeed ukxrmv's good point that
When faced with a service provided by the NHS or a private entity the level of trust they display is high.
New patients have been living in an able-bodied bubble where they never had to deal with the reality of living with a severe chronic illness. They cannot fathom that medics and authority figures will disregard and misinterpret their illness as it runs contrary to everything they've been taught and told, plus the last decades they've been fed ableism in all sorts of ways. And the facade of the psychosomatic medicine building is that what they do in there is built on concern and care for the patients. Psychosomatic medicine might therefore be attractive to try as it promises an easy solution in line with convenient and previously-held beliefs about illness, and it's being done by people who say they care about you and advised by a trusted authority figure. It's a boost for pm, but I have my doubts about how much or lengthy it will be as it doesn't hold up in practise.
