News about Long Covid including its relationship to ME/CFS 2020 to 2021

How different the world is when lots of medics get sick

 

Until Trisha Greenhalgh admits she made a mistake with the following article, I find it difficult to trust her:

https://academic.oup.com/bmb/article/69/1/197/523356

 

What can one say...

https://twitter.com/user/status/1315567025981468674

 

CNN was playing this evening the news that the UK is recruiting young volunteers to be inoculated with COVID-19 after receiving either a vaccine or a placebo.

I have no word. These young people do not know what they risk.

Here is the story: https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news...12-20-intl/h_0e466a3ebc0271f7120b7591ce1877f5

Most people try to avoid Covid-19. But thousands are signing up to be deliberately exposed

 

News & Comment: The Long-Covid Crisis and £10 million on NHS Specialist Clinics for Post-Covid Sufferers
https://meassociation.org.uk/2020/1...-specialist-clinics-for-post-covid-sufferers/

 

what does she expect when GPs are being instructed to diagnose people with MUS.

 

Indeed.

Whenever I see the infographics being posted on Twitter of long lists of post COVID-19 symptoms I see the culture of "the greater the number of reported symptoms = the more likelihood the patient has MUS/somatization disorder/SSD" coming back to bite 'em.

 

The problem with that Greenhalgh Tweet is that she gives no indication of the measures taken by her to verify the diagnosis to enable her to dismiss the GP's rebuttal. Is it known what evidence has to be submitted to enable participation in the research? It may well be there are grounds for concern but we have no way of knowing what they are. We do not the severity of symptoms, whether the patient had a positive test, or was admitted to hospital. In any particular case there may be room for debate about the evidence.

All she says is that she has had a letter. And it's awful isn't it? It may be so, but we do (EDIT not) know.

 

According to this Tweet:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1315379723011227648



Greenhalgh has two papers in preparation:

a qualitative study of illness experience in 112 people with "Long COVID" - which she says is "more clinical/HSR than sociological"

and an additional paper (but unless I've missed it, it's unclear what this second study is researching).

 

Edited to add: Bridget W is a half time GP; Dr Matthew Knight is a Consultant Respiratory Physician, West Herts NHS.


https://twitter.com/user/status/1315597536246276097

 

Article is behind a registration:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1315607397923196929

 

When it's a few medics they get disowned by their peers as traitors. Never cross the doctor patient divide.

 

CNN - Kids struggle with Covid-19 and its months of aftermath by Ryan Prior

Long-haul children may be the most important cohort to research for a couple reasons, according to Leonard Jason, a professor of psychology at DePaul and director of the Center for Community Research, who leads that study.
"Kids are often more defenseless and don't have the age, maturity or resources to stick up for themselves," he said. "And kids are less complex in a lot of ways, so there are fewer extraneous factors."
He has spent much of his career studying post-viral symptoms across a range of diseases and trying to extract lessons from the aftermath of past epidemics.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1315665601029955584

https://twitter.com/user/status/1315666910672023553

 

The article above appears to have been translated through half a dozen languages before arriving at the English!

...He added: “It’s not a title-tattle, it’s a baldardash and nonsense. I can tell you I’m less than a few butcher dogs."...

...Furthermore, young people tend to report taller covids more than older ones, the professor said...

 

I, for one, am shocked, shocked, that standard clinical practice is happening. Who could have predicted that physicians would follow official guidance and training used in practice for years?!

 

Ugh. Still no one has actually argued what needs to be rehabilitated, why physiotherapists, occupational therapists and counselors are needed here to begin with. It makes sense to build that capacity long-term once primary care is competent but right now there simply is no care so thinking about the 6th or 7th step while the first several steps can't happen because of long-standard practices is ridiculous.

No paradox here, medicine is explicitly built to fail with chronic variable fluctuating conditions. What we are seeing right is how medicine deals with this kind of problem, we are not seeing the absence of a response but rather the response itself.

Because this is important here: this is not medicine failing to deal with a brand-new problem and having no plan yet, what we are seeing is the plan in action, with its decades of experience in standard clinical practice. It just so happens that a plan built on rejection of reality is not reconcilable with actual reality. Oops. We told you so.

 

In French but not surprisingly, things are the same everywhere. In a Swiss study, 1/3 of non-hospitalized still have symptoms after 2 months. Smart quote by an internist: "The symptoms vary in the acute forms of the illness. There is no reason why it should be different in the chronic form."

https://twitter.com/user/status/1314975261822197763