Opinion 'Long covid' and how medical information is causing illness: A philosophical issue affecting public health, 2023, Garner, Vogt

Quote:

This article illustrates how the framing of post-covid condition by mainstream medicine may actually be contributing to the illness. Through its actions and words, mainstream medicine may be contributing to the production and the persistence of symptoms, and thus be a iatrogenic factor. We first need mainstream medicine to acknowledge the possibility that these mechanisms are at play. Then, changing the narrative about and conceptualisation of the symptoms, is part of the solution. As Barsky notes, merely explaining to people how nocebo responses and stress may create and prolong symptoms may help.1

This scientifically informed narrative needs to explain and normalise how symptoms and physiological changes are produced in the body in a social and environmental context. This includes the relationships and influences between the brain, the rest of the body, thoughts, expectations, and perceptions. Importantly, we need to include the experiences of people that have recovered in shaping research and the narrative about the illness.12, 13 Available biomedical findings must also be interpreted in light of a broader explanatory framework appropriate for conditions with persistent symptoms. The matter is urgent, both in terms of public health and professional ethics.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jep.13934

 

It's actually famous how medicine has thoroughly ignored and failed to do anything, words and actions both. So that's quite a tall tale they've got going on here. There is still basically no information out of medical sources about Long Covid, so the entire premise is plain silly. Nearly all doctors are either plain denying or massively minimizing, this is what nearly all patients report and it's also the dominant theme going on 4 years.

And they are basically presenting the current paradigm, the source of the failure, as the solution, which they obviously know is the case. Really impressive stuff from this brain trust.

That this can only be published as opinion says everything about how this paradigm came to be and dominate. They are stories some doctors tell themselves, the stuff of hollow Earth or the Moon being made of cheese before NASA went there. It shows that far from being folklore, those tales and narratives can, and do, in fact come from institutions with the intent to manipulate and mislead towards a narrative preferred by those with power and influence.

The experience of those who have recovered is mostly that they don't know why they recovered, most did nothing special. This is also well-known, and it shows the lengths to which quacks and ideologues can go when they are enabled by a dysfunctional system that is unable to accept its own inadequacies. Talk about projection here. Good grief.

 

Words truly mean nothing to charlatans. It's that nearly the entire medical profession agrees and has parroted those that is absurd. It's what failed, and they pretend like it's the solution.

It really does explain everything about the major role religion, beliefs and superstition has played in our history and pre-history. There is such a deep need to assign preferred beliefs that even a so-called scientific profession can fall prey to it this late in its development.

Then again it's showing how limited the development of medicine has been, and how it's now severely limiting its ability to move forward. No scientific discipline can keep on progressing while keeping myths and beliefs from centuries ago. They have deep, deep issues to deal with, and no ability to self-reflect on them. They can't even see their own flaws. It's so much like politics.

 

Perhaps the journal should consider inviting other authors for an opposing viewpoint that attempts to lay out why some academics, among which eminent ones, are so keen on psychologizing long Covid and post-acute infection illnesses?

 

The use of the term "mainstream medicine" is - shall we say - cringe.

 

I would love if doctors who contracted Covid and developed Long Covid could each write a letter to the editor in response. I think it would be meaningful to put these clowns where they belong.

 

It’s interesting how we, the patients, have a mistaken view of our illness, but at the same time the view of ONE SINGLE patient should be taken as definitive because he cured himself!

How does he not see that using his own n=1 experience as the clincher in his argument, puts doubt on his comprehension of the rest of it?

Edit to add:
From the Reflexivity Statement

 

We should ask all infectious disease doctors to see how many HIV patients cured themselves using psychological approaches?

 

"Although space does not permit a thorough review," -> "We ignored any literature that didn't support our hypothesis."

 

And yet the entire medical profession is not only listening to them, they have applied this very model from the start and continue pushing it every single day to most people with LC.

They're just grumbling that it's failing and people are pointing it out, want to simply enforce the belief that it has worked. Psychosomatic ideology is a messaging thing, it was always about pretending that it works.

They got everything they could have ever wanted here, and are still unhappy about it. But they can't think of themselves as being wrong and so are tilting at reality instead of having the maturity to self-reflect because, well, the entire medical profession is following their approach exactly!

No one can succeed while being completely detached from the consequences of their errors.

 

The entire medical profession? Every single one? There is not one person in the medical profession who is treating patients differently?

 

We're talking about maybe 4-5%, so pretty much, yeah.

I'm talking about systems here, not individuals. This is not a profession warm about contrarian choices.

 

Right, so not the entire medical profession, and therefore not the entire medical system, how else do you explain the progress that has been made with NICE and elsewhere? And further efforts to improve the situation aren't helped by making over the top statements; we should leave the unbelievable hyperbole to Garner and the like.