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

Health systems stumble on ‘Long COVID’ as crisis grows

https://www.politico.eu/article/health-systems-stumble-on-long-covid-as-crisis-grows/

This framing is important because last year (or the one before?) there was a commemoration of some milestone with the AIDS crisis, the 30th anniversary I think, and here we see that absolutely nothing was learned from it, medicine is still committing the exact same mistakes as before.

The bonus here is that we already know what will happen, how disastrous it will be, because it already is, it already was before this latest iteration of the same old failure began.

 

New TWIV microbetv podcast with Covid-19 expert doctor opining about managing the symptoms of long-Covid patients, including treating PEM with physical therapy (ahem).

It's at 26 minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09Wh5P-aEmY

 

Literally advised GET for PEM. Ugh. Didn't watch past that part.

Worth correcting, @dave30th?

 

I checked and he really actually said graded exercise therapy for postexertional malaise.

 

Seriously. How is this any different than advising higher sugar intake for diabetes?

 

Medscape article from October 7th
Long-hauler COVID Clinics Are Open, Skepticism Lingers

People have talked about long haulers having nonspecific symptoms of fatigue as well as discomfort despite having tested negative for lung and heart disease. It seems the symptoms are more related to an inflammatory process, and there are similarities with chronic fatigue syndrome.

This clearly could be part of an overlap of what we're describing as long haulers. We know that these are nonspecific symptoms, but an entity has been identified as a real disease with chronic fatigue.

ETA: Interesting discussion in the comments.

 

The guy denying longcovid exists is a medical lawyer (MD, JD)

He also sued a friend for 1 million dollars (for unpaid loans) and has poor (medical) reviews online.

 

From the NIH:
https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/whats-new/

https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/overview/clinical-presentation/

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1315926095594696704

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1315643158865346561

 

Total hot air from Greenhalgh plus the multidisciplinary rehab mantra again (with no evidence yet evidence based).

The clanging of empty tin pots is getting deafening.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1315944967630716929



https://twitter.com/user/status/1315954552475189248

 

Seems like an amateur platform with little or no editorial scrutiny.

 

So now evidence is dispensible.
It all reminds me of Jeremy in the Yellow Submarine

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1315973218872832002

https://twitter.com/user/status/1315944967630716929


Eminence?

 

Exculpatory?

 

What exactly are these treatment approaches anyway? They seem to be saying a lot, but doing very little.

 

Up to 3 months? It's been more than 6 months already so we know it's at least up to 6 months. Bit slow on the uptake over there. Still not even aware of exertion intolerance. Gonna have to speed this thing up several dozen notches if they ever want to catch up to last month.

 

It's a bit on the nose to promote evidence-based medicine when there still is no evidence whatsoever about what to do or what the nature of the problem is. This working-from-conclusions-first approach is very lousy and unimpressive, but it says a lot about how much weight evidence actually carries in this paradigm: very little.