A confused article that pretty much sums up the whole problem and also manages to miss everything significant about it. Two physicians discuss the overall problems with Long Covid and the problem of misinformation, not only unaware that most of the misinformation comes from medicine, but also literally doing that themselves later in the article.
Medicine is the main problem with its continued attachment to psychosomatic ideology, and this article is just the perfect expression of it, and clueless about it. It's precisely because LC is not a new thing that medicine is faceplanting again, and this is something raised in the article, but somehow fails to understands that a disease that is discriminated and denied simply has no chance of progress.
It also repeats the usual confusion about the NIH "investing" $1.15B, unaware or indifferent that this was made by Congress, but also somehow claiming that similar research efforts are happening elsewhere, which is simply false. The only other significant budget came from the UK NIHR and it added up to barely a handful of millions in actual research funding, the rest going to the exact misinformation claptrap that has failed this issue decades before it happened.
With respect, it's people like this who are the problem. They don't understand what is really happening and are contributing to the confusion by not seeing in which direction it points.
Long Covid is Pitting Patients Against Doctors. That’s A Problem.
https://undark.org/2021/12/23/long-covid-is-pitting-patients-against-doctors-thats-a-problem/
As a result, long Covid has drawn comparisons with so-called contested illnesses, such as myalgic encephalomyelitis (also known as chronic fatigue syndrome) and fibromyalgia, whose legitimacy are questioned by the medical profession.
This is the whole problem in a nutshell, it's precisely not because it's new that it's completely dysfunctional, as if diseases whose legitimacy is disputed is some minor factor of little relevance and also completely passive.
But it would be unfair to say that the medical community has entirely dismissed long Covid. Substantial amounts of effort and funding are now being put into long Covid research. The National Institutes of Health has announced more than a billion dollars of new funding
The medical community literally did not do that, it was the work of activists and advocates that forced the only substantial research program, literally attributing to medicine the success of patient organizations. Amazing.
For now, however, the illness remains shrouded in unknowns, and there’s a legitimate concern that misinformation will fill in the gaps — as it seemingly has with almost everything Covid-19 related so far. Already, we have personally seen pseudoscientific groups claiming, without evidence, to have knowledge of how to treat long Covid.
Yes, it's called the biopsychosocial model of illness, or sometimes just psychosomatic medicine, and it's in all the damn gaps, because hot air just gets everywhere it can fill.
This is literally misinformation, this is simply not what brain fog is and here they are advising for a BS pseudoscience treatment, in an article trying to raise the issue of misinformation leading to useless treatments.
Fortunately, there are steps that can be taken to mend the budding rift between long Covid patients and health care professionals — hopefully in time to stop the wave of misinformation before it crests.
Words that would have been significant 5 decades ago, and ring completely hollow today, things are even worse than ever precisely because of decades of hostile behavior towards us, making it impossible for medicine to save face and just move on already.
Having a chronic illness is frustrating. People suffering with long Covid are right to feel impatient with what is, in many ways, a broken medical system.
But here it's not the broken medical system that chronic illness sufferers have always faced that they think of. Because they are completely unaware of just how broken health care already was for chronic illness, and the main reason why all the same failures are happening again, including this article, which mostly whitewashes the real issues and points elsewhere, anywhere but where the blame lies.
It's seriously weird how they basically point to all the problems, yet are unable to actually acknowledge them as by far the most significant part.
