Profound Symptom Alleviation in Long-Covid Patients After PAMP-Immunotherapy: Three Case Reports, 2023, Hobohm et al

Profound Symptom Alleviation in Long-Covid Patients After PAMP-Immunotherapy: Three Case Reports

Abstract
Background
Long-Covid patients suffer from a range of symptoms with a largely varying degree of severity, including chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), post-exertional malaise (PEM), postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), loss of smell and/or taste, cough, shortness of breath, headache, muscle ache, sleep disturbance, cognitive dysfunction, and depression.

Treatment
PAMP-immunotherapy was developed by one of us (UH), inspired by the old fever therapy a century ago, to treat cancer patients. Unintentionally, in three cases of Long-Covid, quick and profound symptom alleviation could be observed after only a few PAMP treatments.

Conclusion
PAMP-immunotherapy might be a treatment option for Long-Covid patients which is surprisingly brief, cheap, and effective.

https://www.qeios.com/read/69I32L#reviews

 

Don't think anything useful can be said about three case reports. I had never heard of the website/journal Qeios and the website seems very scammy (very ChatGPT-like) but at least some of the reviews on this paper do actually pose the right kind of questions (some also seem awfully strange), they all came in extremely quickly.

 

Qeios is actually a very good idea in that it is free access, referees have to give their names and authors can respond as many times as they like. Having lost all faith in the 'respectable' journals Qeios is the one I now use. There is no pretence of a stamp of approval - the data are there and you just have to judge it for yourself.

Certainly that means that a lot of rubbish is published on Qeios, but so it is in the Lancet.

 

Having a quick look this seems to be mega-quackery so we can bin it. I liked the sentence that sums up their results

We have seen numerous remissions (data not shown).

 

Thank you for providing some extra context (I certainly believe free access shouldn’t be a compliment, but a necessity). I’m suprised by how quickly all reviews came in for such a questionable paper (9 reviews already within 5 days) do you have some information on how the reviewers are chosen?

 

Yes, Qeios has a search engine that sends out review invitations the day the paper is posted. I am not sure how many but maybe 20 or so. The choice of reviewers is based on relevant key words to avoid any editorial cronyism. That has its downside but where there is dross you can see it is dross.

Authors are also asked for suggested referees. So you can set up a dialogue with someone who has similar but slightly different interests/views. Other referees can chip in and in fact anyone can review if they open the paper. That can provide an opportunity to reply to people who don't understand what yo are proposing and clear out some myths.

Generally you get some reviews in the first week. Reviews from significant figures in the field may come in a month or so later but there is an edge to the process that I think discourages the practice of leaving reviewing in one in tray for three months.

I think Qeios is ideal for 'Blue sky' papers. I am not sure t makes sense for clinical reports though. If clinical reports are of value they should probably be put in the specialty archives - like Annals of Internal Medicine or Blood or Gastroenterology.