Trial By Error

Tag: Long Covid

  • Journalist Ryan Prior Discusses His Upcoming Book on Long Covid, The Long Haul

    CNN journalist Ryan Prior is the author of an upcoming book on long Covid called The Long Haul: Solving the Puzzle of the Pandemic’s Long Haulers and How They Are Changing Healthcare Forever. Ryan, who is 32, has struggled with ME/CFS for half of his life—he first got sick in October, 2006, just before his…

  • A Few Things of Interest I Read This Week

    Miriam Tucker on Long Covid in WebMd The always reliable Miriam Tucker, who has frequently covered ME/CFS for Medscape and other publications, has just written a piece for WebMD called “Long COVID Mimics Other Post-Viral Conditions.” The article covers some of the similarities in symptoms between long Covid and ME/CFS and highlights advocacy efforts to…

  • An Interview With Mt Sinai’s David Putrino About Long Covid, ME/CFS, and Related Issues

    David Putrino is a neuroscientist and physical therapist at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. He runs a research lab and a rehabilitation center that quickly became a magnet for patients grappling with what has come to be known as long Covid–what the US National Institutes of Health calls post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (PASC). We…

  • Now a Scottish Long Covid Study Fails to Mention the Risk of Post-Exertional Malaise

    And here’s another major trial designed by investigators who think that an exercise program might be the optimal strategy for treating the complex grab-bag of conditions known as long Covid. As with other long Covid research, these investigators seem either unaware of or unconcerned about the core ME/CFS symptom known as post-exertional malaise (PEM)–also called…

  • More on the REGAIN Trial for Long Covid Patients

    ********** I wrote recently about the problematic REGAIN study from the University of Warwick, which is testing an exercise-and-psychological-rehab program as a treatment for long Covid patients. Unfortunately, neither the protocol nor the participant information sheet, to which participants are referred during the consenting process, mentions the core ME/CFS symptom of post-exertional malaise (PEM), which…

  • The Usual Suspects Promote a Psychosocial “Research Agenda” for Long Covid

    In what could be described as a form of epistemic land grab, core members of the graded exercise therapy/cognitive behavior therapy (GET/CBT) ideological brigades have proposed a “research agenda” for long Covid that reflects the premises of their crumbling treatment paradigm for ME/CFS. This is not surprising. It has been clear from the early reports…

  • Does “Long Covid” Need Rebranding As “Ongoing Covid-19 Recovery”?

    Now here’s a paper called “The Effects of Messaging on Expectations and Understanding of Long COVID: An Online Randomised Trial,” from researchers at the UK’s Health Security Agency. Two of the nine authors, including the senior author who conceived the study, are also affiliated with a National Institute for Health Research unit that partners with…

  • French Dogs on the Trail; Impact of Long Covid on the US Job Market

    Can Dogs Smell Compounds Associated with Host Response in Long Covid? It can be unwise to pay attention to research published on a pre-print server before it has been through a peer-review process. Although passing through peer-review is itself no guarantee of quality, the process represents at least one layer of scrutiny. Nonetheless, some pre-prints…

  • Professor Lubet’s Take on The New Yorker’s Long Covid Article

    I wrote a post last month about the recent wave of Long Covid coverage—some of it excellent (The Atlantic) and some way over the edge in its assertions of psychogenic causation of symptoms (The American Spectator, Spiked). Then there was the seemingly sympathetic New Yorker article by a physician, with its more subtle form of…

  • BBC’s Problematic Coverage of New Long COVID Study

    Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, suggesting an equivalence between COVID-19 and influenza has been a consistent approach among those seeking to downplay the current situation. So it’s not surprising to see something similar happen with comparisons between Long COVID and the delayed recovery some people experience after an acute bout of the flu.…

  • Medical Societies and new Komaroff-Lipkin Paper Highlight Long COVID and ME/CFS Links

    While some medical professionals argue that prolonged non-specific symptoms after acute COVID-19 are psychogenic and that “Long COVID” as a presumed clinical entity was concocted by a cabal of queers and feminists, others are getting on with efforts to disseminate more appropriate information to their colleagues. These efforts often involve drawing parallels with the pathophysiology…

  • Lowenstein’s Guardian Opinion; Eliot Smith’s Post-NICE View; Tack’s Take on Blinding Study

    The Guardian has published a lot of nonsense about Long COVID and has provided a platform for people who argue that robust manly thoughts are the path to recovery. Of course, it also published George Monbiot’s powerful columns on the topic, including his rebuttal of silly accusations that he was triggering more Long COVID cases…