Rather than accepting the reality of our latest agonizing illness, a string of news articles, backed by a contingent of scientists, has begun to call long Covid “psychogenic”-all in the head. And despite the utter tragedy of long Covid, our newest pandemic illness offers the opportunity for just that.īut instead of accepting evidence emerging from university labs and teaching hospital clinics devoted to the study of long Covid, a new movement has evolved to lump together these endlessly sick patients with others who don’t get well-including individuals with fibromyalgia, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), and persistent symptoms of Lyme disease. If only their symptoms could be traced to a physiological cause, a whole class of illnesses currently labeled “medically unexplained” or “contested” would be routinely understood by mainstream medicine. Despite continued reports, patients with this presentation are routinely dismissed. In the worst cases, such patients experience disability on par with late-stage AIDS or congestive heart failure. Such infections can also make an imprint through sleep disorders, nerve damage, and air hunger , where you feel as if you can’t get enough air and struggle to breathe. The list of abnormalities also includes the reactivation of viruses previously dormant in the body and the dysregulation of cortisol, a hormone needed in order to properly respond to stress.Ī host of infectious triggers, from SARS and Epstein–Barr virus to Lyme disease and strep, can set off the same constellation of disabling symptoms, including brain fog, unrelenting fatigue, and pain.
The specific pathways are too numerous to comprehensively list here, but studies show they include weakened immune response due to low levels of virus-fighting natural killer cells and heightened inflammation driven by elevated levels of signaling chemicals called cytokines.
For several decades, scientists had been finding disruptions in the bodies of those with post-infectious conditions. Nationwide, millions were suddenly experiencing the same seemingly new disease, long Covid.īut for those following the science of chronic illness-and those who’d lived it themselves-the appearance of long Covid was as predictable as the rise of the morning sun. Each individual’s story seemed to echo the others, fitting a pattern and timeline apart from the mainstream narrative. As leaders were telling the public that those infected with the virus would recover within a couple of weeks, I met dozens of survivors whose bodies gave a much different accounting of the facts. I started reaching out to patients living through the aftermath of Covid, people who got sick and stayed sick. In the early months of 2020 as Covid swept the world, I was a science writer with a mandate to tell the human stories of the pandemic. Is the Genetic Literacy Project a corporate ‘front’? GLP responds to ongoing false allegations from US Right to Know / Organic Consumers Association / SourceWatch / Baum Hedlund / Church of Scientology.
0 kommentar(er)
