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.
 
I had a look. The physician criticising is an ER physician who has had to give up work to look after two sick kids. He does not raise any very specific criticism of Levinovitz's arguments. Yet Levinovitz is painting this as 'the case against him'. Maybe he should have suggested Twitterati read the thread here. I find Levinovitz's approach quite unsavoury now.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
Yet Levinovitz is painting this as 'the case against him'. Maybe he should have suggested Twitterati read the thread here. I find Levinovitz's approach quite unsavoury now.
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I'll just re-up JellyBabyKid's post #303 linking a video interview from 7 months ago.

The full interview is on YouTube, but there are two 2 minute clips in LongCovidAdvocacy's Bluesky post that should be accessible.

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"And what I argue in this book is — and again keeping with the Rumpelstilskin effect — that back in the day before the scientific revolution, people would attribute to demons and witchcraft mysterious causes of illness. After the scientific revolution, people said 'well either the cause is natural or biological, or it doesn't exist. We don't allow supernatural causes.' But unfortunately, as we know, psychology — that is to say non-biological supernatural things — that is not natural, so a concept, a belief, a fear can cause physiological problems. And what I argue in this book is that we've forgotten these, we've excluded these causes of suffering. And as a result there are millions of people who are suffering because of what would have been called supernatural causes in the past, and are not able to heal themselves. And if we accept these causes, but within the framework of what we understand to be scientifically accurate, we'll be able to resolve enormous numbers of problems, that are currently unresolvable. Like the epidemic of chronic pain for example, like the epidemic of mental health diagnoses."
 
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