Wired Magazine: The Painful Truth About Long Covid

I read the article again, more thoroughly. AL has picked up on a lot of the issues well known here. But there is one simply mis-connect.

Since 2017 at least we have discussed the possibility of brain cell loops. They could well be described as an alarm system stuck on.

But there is nothing to suggest that 'brain retraining' methods derived from Sarno or traditional CBT would reverse such loops. The evidence that we have for these techniques being useful is overwhelmingly negative. Dr Kennedy cannot even get her physiology right.

The irony is that there is now some real neuroscience - the neuron-related gene variants of DecodeME. The political problem is noot that doctors cannot set up brain retraining. The problem has been that scientists have been refused funding for the basic neuroscience that would be the route to understanding brain loops. Nor is the problem that nobody can talk about brains. Yes, there are internet forums where these things are taboo, but they don't make any difference to the scientific progress. When real evidence for brain involvement is available Chris Ponting has no problem saying precisely that at scientific meetings and in webinars.

Levinovitz has got caught up in precisely the social babble that he says is a problem and which is actually irrelevant to scientific progress. If you come at science with the naive perspective of the man in the street then all sorts of inefficiencies will seem strange. For those of us who have been in the field a while there is nothing strange about the dog's breakfast of committee-driven and fringe research around Long Covid that has got nowhere. It is the muddle you get when most people in a field don't really understand enough detail to know what they are doing.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
But there is nothing to suggest that 'brain retraining' methods derived from Sarno or traditional CBT would reverse such loops. The evidence that we have for these techniques being useful is overwhelmingly negative. Dr Kennedy cannot even get her physiology right.
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The most telling is how little efficacy CBT and similar models have on things that actually are (or seem like) such loops, such as addiction and actual thinking and behavioral disorders. It doesn't even reliably work on the things that it should be most effective at, which oddly enough has led to extending its use onto things it's even less likely to be effective at, and sure enough isn't.

Obviously they are still used for those, but that's mainly because actual efficacy matters very little, as those interventions are rated based on intent, not outcomes. Rehabilitation rehabilitates, and so someone who goes to rehabilitation is rehabilitated. QED. The scientific revolution has revolved mainly about one thing: unless you can truly understand the mechanism of a problem, any solution you might have it is almost guaranteed to have little to no beneficial impact, and figuring those out is usually very hard.

And so, naturally, one of the foundations of this ideology is to dismiss science, to dismiss even medical science, absurdly talking about "magic pills", when actually pills that work aren't magic, they're science, because science works. Because humans gonna human.
If you come at science with the naive perspective of the man in the street then all sorts of inefficiencies will seem strange.
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Same idea behind "to someone who doesn't understand how the world works, everything looks like a conspiracy". It also applies on a smaller scale, one can understand much of the world, but still look at a particular problem and decide there must be a grand conspiracy at foot here. And what the article suggests, about how this magical healing cure is being suppressed, despite being the absolute dominant model for decades, is evoking a grand conspiracy. It asserts that there exists the cure to ailments that disable millions, but they simply refuse to try, even though everyone affected does, in part because it's effectively silenced, despite having been pushed coercively for decades into absolute, total dominance.

"This difficult problem has a simple, easy solution, you just refuse to try it", they will say to the people who not only have tried it, but requires absurd, convoluted beliefs to think it even makes sense.
 
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Did anyone notice this: "The most common designation, and the one used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is ME/CFS, which stands for ‘myalgic encephalitis/chronic fatigue syndrome.’”

Of course the CDC site says "encephalomyelitis," not "encephalitis."

Does anyone have access to a current version of the article? I'm wondering if this mistake was fixed.
 
It appears there have been two changes to the article from the archive.is snapshot to today's; the first was the change from "encephalitis" to "encephalomyelitis"; the second was a change in the description of @dave30th's position from "journalist and lecturer" to "senior fellow":

d.webp
 
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