Wired Magazine: The Painful Truth About Long Covid by Alan Levinovitz, 2026

Jaybee00 said:


Zeynep thread—debates Levinovitz.


“Problem with this article isn’t that it’s about how medicine’s mind/body duality impedes scientific advances (true), but that it does it without referencing the truly interesting new scientific developments while repackaging stale and incorrect viewpoints by a few as “advances”.
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I have no idea who these people are or what they are on about
 
Jaybee00 said:
Can someone please post the full interaction?
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See my explanation here on how to access X/Twitter without account:
Chandelier said:
There are many different frontends for the popular social networks that allow access for everyone, even without an account.
You can replace x.com in your link with xcancel.com and then it’s always accessible for everyone.

Social NetworkReplacement
X/Twitterxcancel.com
Blueskyskywriter.blue
Instagramimginn.com
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Here‘s the link to the full thread: https://xcancel.com/MeganTStevenson/status/2061763714768847210#m
I don’t think the forum rules allow posting the full thread that includes posts by many different people.
 
Either the discussion is relevant and so we need some details about it, or it’s not.
I’m not investing my time to read a twitter argument which may or may not be relevant to the thread, just to find out.
It’s not helpful to show part of a discussion which makes no real sense then direct people to read more elsewhere if they want to understand, in my opinion
 
MrMagoo said:
I love Dr Elke Hausmann’s writing, this was brilliant.
It’s really heartening to see these well-written rebuttals from allies.
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The placebo effect gets a mention – as ‘the power of the mind to produce symptom improvement’ – which the author seems to suggest is how mind-body approaches ‘work’.
This is actually quite funny really, because it means they don’t work.
When we do placebo-controlled treatment trials, we are precisely trying to find out if a treatment does MORE THAN placebo, or belief.
Yes, the mind can impact our experience. Of course.
Attention or not to a symptom can affect how we experience it; we all know that.
The idea that us patients who experience our illness as a physical or biological issue have no awareness of our own psychology is a weird distortion of reality.
But belief really cannot overcome a symptom like PEM, and it cannot cure Long Covid.
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dave30th said:
The internet is toxic. Every debate on the internet is toxic. It doesn't matter what the issue is. All discussion of health issues on the internet become toxic--just like, as Godwin's law holds, every debate eventually reaches Nazis and the Holocaust. The story seems to be suggesting that mind/body debates are uniquely toxic and lead to a unique "climate of fear" that impacts only mind/body practitioners and patients who report improvement with mind/body techniques. That seems like a big stretch grounded in a pretty narrow view of the online world.
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This nicely sums up what I was trying to say. It's not that toxic debate is okay, it's that it's so common that by comparison the debate over this issue actually stands out for being on the extreme low end. We have to be extremely civil and polite and nice because our opponents are the entire freaking medical profession. Despite what the author oddly said, about discussion on this issue being impossible, it's actually a rare issue that has almost universal acceptance (for the wrong side, but still). Almost all except the victims agree with this position and can't stop gushing over how wonderful it would be if it were true. Simply pointing out that "the placebo" is not this magical healing things gets people angry, because most people badly want it to be true. Humans love magic and healing magic is the most appealing of all.

We are the only ones bringing rain to the party, pointing out that none of this is actually true, how even the evidence contradicts the fantasy narratives, and that pretending otherwise ruins millions of lives, but the controversy is actually so mild it's probably milder than the vast majority of completely unimportant trivial topics, including most hobbies.

It's because of that near universal acceptance for this woo that despite the facts being entirely on our side nothing ever changes. Which only naturally increases frustration because our lives are melting away with little hope of rescue, only chance, until it stops being a debate and becomes a problem that is worked on with the scale that's needed.

Plus the author is saying a lot of this hanging out on twitter, a social media platform very friendly to Nazis where women routinely get sent AI-generated photos being assaulted and tortured, for simply existing. It's actually hard to build a glassier glass house.
 
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Amw66 said:
Because they know how crap their research is.
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It's a small thing, but it is very telling how often some of them, especially Sharpe, have complained about this torrent of FOIA requests that made it impossible for them to do any work, when it was actually such a low volume that it would not otherwise be noticed, as the institutions receiving them routinely handle those without a fuss. Mostly because every single time it reveals deceit, fabrication or outright fraud, which they only get away with because the ideology is so completely dominant in our culture that it can be thoroughly exposed and it changes nothing.

I think this is where "a hit dog hollers" comes into play.
 
Jaybee00 said:
“Problem with this article isn’t that it’s about how medicine’s mind/body duality impedes scientific advances (true), but that it does it without referencing the truly interesting new scientific developments while repackaging stale and incorrect viewpoints by a few as “advances”.
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Ah, this must be "The Neuroscience"(TM) we keep hearing about, which vaguely and generically alludes to the fact that people reporting symptoms seem to report symptoms and have some similarities, mostly in having symptoms, whether or not medical science understands them. Such compelling, uh, stuff.

It's really absurd how most of this debate is still stuck at the infant stage of "dualism" when the entire ideology is basically the last remaining split in this divide. The very existence of a split between, let's go with, biomedicine, aka scientific medicine, and biopsychosocial models, is the last bit of duality that remains in contention, and we are some of the only people who keep rejecting it in favor of natural, rather than supernatural, scientific explanations, none of which allow such a concept as "the mind" to begin with.
 
The placebo effect gets a mention – as ‘the power of the mind to produce symptom improvement’ – which the author seems to suggest is how mind-body approaches ‘work’.
This is actually quite funny really, because it means they don’t work.
When we do placebo-controlled treatment trials, we are precisely trying to find out if a treatment does MORE THAN placebo, or belief.
Yes, the mind can impact our experience. Of course.
Click to expand...
Well put, but things are actually one step beyond that. There is no reason to even bring up beliefs here for the most part, people will report things they know to be false, even without being encouraged to. There is no more common lie than "how are you?" "oh, fine", which is part of the daily routine for billions of people. Which isn't much different from saying "oh, I'm OK, I guess, not too bad". And in a clinical trial, there is a lot of influence exerted towards reporting feeling better, regardless of whether it's any true.

Those are not beliefs, they're just things people say because it's expected. And unfortunately the medical profession is very happy to exploit this, sometimes, while rejecting it at others. It's all very confused, but it doesn't have much to do with actual beliefs. People say false things all the damn time. Usually only slightly false. So very few people will report feeling 9/10 after some non-intervention, when they actually feel 2/10. But they might say "uhhh maybe 3, possibly 4, I don't know", and really the whole problem here is that it's not possible to know because there is no more right answer to "from 0/10 how are you feeling?" than it's possible to have a consensus on which flower is the prettiest, or ranking artichokes from the smoothest to the grittiest.

All of this is more than enough, when using very low standards where the smallest possible blip is somehow hailed as a miracle cure, to turn a null into a "might be of help to some". Which is another giant red flag for pseudoscience, but somehow here it all gets swept under the rug because damn would it be nice if this magical mind healing stuff was real.

There are no right answers to subjective assessments, including feelings, so it's never possible to actually check, and the statistical tools used to help are basically a joke, because they shouldn't even be used on subjective ratings anyway, even less so when any underlying answers aren't fixed. Along with massive biases in favor of non-interventions, this easily explains 90-95% of "placebo", and it's still the smallest possible effect of them all, even treatments that don't work can sometimes seem to perform better.

I have no idea how any of this debate is any different from taking a random wellness cult whose adherents swear their whole life was transformed because they bathed in some mud, or whatever. Or the healing power of prayer. It's all exactly the same thing.
 
rvallee said:
Well put, but things are actually one step beyond that. There is no reason to even bring up beliefs here for the most part, people will report things they know to be false, even without being encouraged to. There is no more common lie than "how are you?" "oh, fine", which is part of the daily routine for billions of people. Which isn't much different from saying "oh, I'm OK, I guess, not too bad". And in a clinical trial, there is a lot of influence exerted towards reporting feeling better, regardless of whether it's any true.

Those are not beliefs, they're just things people say because it's expected. And unfortunately the medical profession is very happy to exploit this, sometimes, while rejecting it at others. It's all very confused, but it doesn't have much to do with actual beliefs. People say false things all the damn time. Usually only slightly false. So very few people will report feeling 9/10 after some non-intervention, when they actually feel 2/10. But they might say "uhhh maybe 3, possibly 4, I don't know", and really the whole problem here is that it's not possible to know because there is no more right answer to "from 0/10 how are you feeling?" than it's possible to have a consensus on which flower is the prettiest, or ranking artichokes from the smoothest to the grittiest.

All of this is more than enough, when using very low standards where the smallest possible blip is somehow hailed as a miracle cure, to turn a null into a "might be of help to some". Which is another giant red flag for pseudoscience, but somehow here it all gets swept under the rug because damn would it be nice if this magical mind healing stuff was real.

There are no right answers to subjective assessments, including feelings, so it's never possible to actually check, and the statistical tools used to help are basically a joke, because they shouldn't even be used on subjective ratings anyway, even less so when any underlying answers aren't fixed. Along with massive biases in favor of non-interventions, this easily explains 90-95% of "placebo", and it's still the smallest possible effect of them all, even treatments that don't work can sometimes seem to perform better.

I have no idea how any of this debate is any different from taking a random wellness cult whose adherents swear their whole life was transformed because they bathed in some mud, or whatever. Or the healing power of prayer. It's all exactly the same thing.
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It’s different because the privileged establishment are pushing it.
 
I often think pretending to be actually religious to the neuroplastic mind-body crew might be fun to try (although having a Catholic background means ultimately everything is all your own fault anyway for being born) I’d pay good money to see someone try though.
 
The term "brain retraining" itself is too silly to be taken seriously.

Should we start to instead call it "cognitive-behavioral techniques"?

"Cognitive-behavioral techniques to stop one's long covid symptoms."

That is more descriptive and matter-of-fact, and removes some of the mystique.
 
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