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by JamesBarney 1480 days ago
The problem with a study like this is that they probably aren't doing a good job distinguish true long covid from psychosomatic long covid. And there is a lot of evidence that "long covid" correlates much more highly with pre-existing anxiety levels than disease severity.

I think long covid exists I just think there is also a lot of psychosomatic long covid and until we have a good diagnostic criteria to differentiate the two it'll be really hard to study it.

4 comments

The two most easily diagnosable metrics are a blood test showing reactivated EBV and/or a POTS diagnosis (which involves measurements of how your blood pressure and heart rate change while changing positions). Just because someone doesn't have those doesn't mean they aren't suffering long term effects from COVID.

I've had both consistently for about 2 years now, along with some other neurological symptoms post-covid (no clinical anxiety or depression though). It's made me more of a believer in listening to other people's experiences.

Oh I'm 100% not arguing long covid doesn't exist I have several friends who have long term sequelae from covid. But judging by the research people like yourself and them are probably out numbered by people who have psychosomatic issues.

And that makes studying and treating cases like yours and their's more difficult.

I also 100% believe that psychosomatic diseases are real and need to be taken seriously, they just require a different treatment plan than persistent auto-immunity or permanent lung or heart damage.

It's not an easy distinction to make though. Actual "long COVID" itself is likely to be a collection of ailments (recovery from physical damage to lungs and cardiovascular system, post-viral trigger happy immune systems, possible opportunistic infection or symptoms of existing latent virus due to COVID-induced weakness) which differ from person to person and at least some of those ailments plausibly interact with anxiety (a psychological problem that has physiological effects on blood pressure, cortisol levels etc itself)
The media wants you to believe that the vaccine protects against longterm covid. If it doesn't many people would skip the upcoming 4th, 5th, 6th round because it is providing no additional protection against the latest variants.

But here is an actual study that goes against this story. Will you believe science or myth? Are there enough excuses to keep the myth alive?

Far as I could tell, the study doesn't break it down by whether people have had boosters. So we don't know whether they provide additional protection.

The study also doesn't include omicron, so whether the shots protect against the latest variants is also unknown.

Why does the media care if you get a 4th dose? How does it help them?
Pharma profits handsomely whenever government subsidizes more boosters.
The government isn't exactly rushing to 4th doses. They could authorize it for under 50s right now, but there's little evidence that it makes a significant difference, so they haven't.

Also note that we still don't have vaccines for kids under 5.

If the government wanted to line the pockets of pharma more, there's not a lot stopping them. So it's hard to take blanket statements about this seriously. I'm not denying that this has happened in the past, just that it's a lot more complicated than any single conspiracy theory.

There's probably more money to be made by treating lots of Covid patients in the hospital. Drugs, equipment, exotic treatments, doctor bills. Vaccines are less profitable. Get outta here with your conspiracy theories.
Hypermobility (cartilage dysfunction) and anxiety disorders correlate.

Vitamin D and K interact with cartilage.

Vitamin D deficiency and severity of covid infection correlate. As does obesity. Obesity causes vitamin D deficiency.

Brainfog is a symptom of covid and causes some people to fall down levels of maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Falling down maslow’s hierarchy of needs causes anxiety.

Anxiety depletes the body of B vitamins. B vitamin deficiencies can impact on glutathione production. Glutathione deficiency can impact immune function.

Spinal alignment/stability helps one maintain focus. Poor spinal alignment causes the brain to burn energy on proprioception. Causing mental fatigue, ie brainfog.

When the body is under stress the cellular membranes become less functional. I think this an immune protective mechanism (speculative). I think you can control cellular permeability with lipid ratio ingestion and calorie management. Cellular permeability affects the mitochondrial energy production and immunity. It makes sense that cellular protection is optimised over energy production when recuperating from a viral illness.

The brain impacts the immune system, there is immune memory stored in the brain.

I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome 4 years ago after contracting a chinese flu.

I am writing this because when people write the word psychosomatic I think the same thing. I just think no-one in medicine has a comprehensive understanding of what psychosomatic is.

I also think long-covid is worse than chronic-fatigue. The base damage is worse, then there is the same viral borne psychosomatic condition layered over the top of it.

What the people safely ensconsed up maslow’s needs hierarchy often fail to understand is the immense stress felt by the people sliding down it.

Incremental motivation and autonomy is hugely important to mental health. The homeless and mentally discounted don’t get much. So there’s this often unarrestable downward spiral.

When you land literally on the floor. The way back up is swimmers stretchers an arm, then a leg, then a leg, then an arm. Build up that spinal strength and propioception with whatever spare energy the body has available to it. It takes at least six months and there are numerous crashes.

You need to eat really simple foods because the brain goes into ptsd mode and hypersensitivities emerge.

You need a really comfortable bed because you are in constant pain and can’t sleep.

You need to know you won’t be homeless because the anxiety will wipe out the b-vitamins faster than the you can ingest them.

The support groups will tell you you have a 5% chance of recovery.

I think it is a psychosomatic illness as well but medication won’t help. I also think some people’s immune systems end up in such a state of depletion that it is just a pure untreatable illness for them.

If you try and communicate any of this in the midst of brain-fog the natural assumption is that you are whinging and crazy. Forgiveness helps, anger management helps.

I think permeability of the membrane inner ear is the underlying causitive mechanism of long-covid chronic fatigue syndrome. You need really good potassium concentration in the inner ear for proprioception to work effectively. Lying down plus the cellular stress permeability response depletes this concentration. Hypermobility exacerbates the problem, the membrane is partially cartilagenous.

This leads to brainfog and fatigue when moving. You have to build yourself up really slowly and there are alot of critics. Outwardly you don’t look that terrible.

I spent time figuring this out to get better. Now I work in telesales because a failure mode of the prefrontal cortex (requiring the most brain energy kind of) is that you tend to talk alot.

I’m getting better, slowly crawling back up Maslow’s hierrarchy. No doctor told me any of this.

I got lucky, didn’t believe my diagnosis initially. (Takes the average person 7 years to be disgnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome). I asked for the most alternative physio at the practice I went to for the constant pain. He wouldn’t discuss the condition at all but he got me doing swimmers stretches and propioception exercises.

I can do sideplanks now. What people don’t understand is that your energy doesn’t collapse immediately. It takes up to 72 hours post exertion for the mitochondria to be overwhelmed and the fatigue and brainfog to kick in.

It is very easy for people to arrive at a place of learned helplessness. It is very easy for family members to question your behaviours from the perspective of mental illness. When you yourself don’t understand why your own energy is collapsing.

You can’t differentiate psycho-somatic from the physical. All that will help it is treatment plans that assume there isn’t a psychological cure in and of itself. Physical therapy is hugely important. More research is required into the base damage of the corona-virus. Then the treatment plan needs to regularly tweaked till it gets to the point of basic health maintenance.

No-one’s getting rich of this so I can’t see it happening soon.

My dream is a better collaborative information system for treating chronic illness. I think people are overly focused on causative mechanisms. Body’s heal themselves given the right conditions.

I wish a company existed where people report their pre-existing conditions, symptoms and medical test and diagnostic result then get given a best-practice treatment plans. The results of the treatment plans are monitored using fitbits. Then incremental adjustments are made to the treatment plan using machine learning to search for symptom dopplegangers and discover what worked and what didn’t for other health dopplegangers.

I don’t know why this doesn’t exist. I think the returns on medical research are getting less and less. The body is multisystemic and everybody is unique. But with 8 billion people there are loads of symptom dopplegangers. We don’t need to know why something works to know that it works. The search for why has diminishing return with each level of complexity. A smaller and smaller percentage of the population can afford the latest medical treatments. Medical research is expensive and wasteful. The top of maslow’s hierarchy is really saying that there is no need for why just being.

I think collaborative sympton doppleganger machine learning optimised treatment plans should be the future of medicine. It is what computer innovation should be about.

There should also be a whole lot more research into vitamin-d vitamin k and cholesterol metabolism. This is an intersection of multi-systemic conditions where membrane permeability, hyper-mobility and anxiety correlate.

You can test for hypermobility by straightening your elbow. If it goes backward even a bit, delve further, you are bendy and may need to manage that bendiness proactively.