A lot of resources have been invested in looking for biomedical explanatory models for suffering that could not be medically explained. Imagine if the doctors instead were to ask themselves what makes patients more or less ill. [...]
The narrative about postcovid includes the successful person who loves his job, exercises and is healthy. The successful physician and professor of tropical medicine, Paul Garner, was a perfect fit. Three months after his infection last spring, he suffered severely from shortness of breath, fog, strange skin phenomena, fatigue and arrhythmias.
On social media and in my email box, there are several who referred to Paul Garner as "proof" that the disease is strictly medical. It is based on some strange assumptions: that doctors - unlike "ordinary people" - have a body that functions separately from all the factors that affect the rest of us (such as stress, anxiety, fear, sadness). So some people are either body (doctor/researcher) or soul (hysterics/imagination). Not - like all of us - both.
Furthermore, the assumption is based on the fact that the morbidity that is now spreading looks the same for everyone. Since Paul Garner obviously had several objectively verifiable symptoms (such as arrhythmia), the conclusion is that this is a physical illness. To 100 percent.
Today, no one in postcovid groups refers to Paul Garner. In the blog version of the scientific journal BMJ, he tells how he, with the help of a Norwegian psychologist, who recovered from ME themself, learned that our unconscious defense against injury and infection sometimes sets off false alarms. That a malicious cycle, with autonomous responses (not regulated by will, such as pulse and blood pressure), is triggered. And that tracks in the brain are drawn like tire marks in clay. Garner learned to redraw these tracks. He stopped scanning his symptoms and reading stories about others as well as interacting in patient groups on Facebook. Now he's healthy. Which, of course, made the video an overnight sensation.
