I spent years being dismissed as depressed Or having anxiety. When I finally was diagnosed and started treating condition with medications I could handle my cognitive problems and depression lifted.
Support groups for autoimmune conditions are full of people who routinely are dismissed by doctors.
I don't know how we teach general practitioners, but we are doing something horribly wrong. A lot of long covid people must be finding this out too, and it is just super sad.
One of my biggest lessons early in life was that not all doctors are the same (by a long shot). This is why it’s so important to see specialists related to your condition. And ultimately you’re going to be most responsible for getting proper care as often only you know what you’re experiencing.
Medicine and pathology are far to wide of subjects for generalists to operate efficiently across every field and niche. Which is why specialization is so important and connecting the patients to the right specialists.
There’s a lot of analogies to technology, where people tend to expect the experts to do and know everything and completely defer to them. I think we all have experienced this with our parents or people who didn’t grow up with computers. When ultimately the individual is always going to be a huge part of the puzzle and must accept that fact.
We send them to a school which emphasizes cramming vast amounts of established knowledge into their heads, at the expense of critical thinking skills, social skills, and for that matter sleep. In a world where doctors use Google and WebMD the same as everyone else (because of course they do, no one retains an encyclopaedic knowledge of every medical condition), it's basically a hazing ritual.
What disease was it? What kind of medications have helped you?
I'm suffering from some kind of autoimmune-like disease with similar symptoms and trying to figure out what's wrong with me.
Plaqunial helped a lot, but I can’t tolerate it. Shame, it works well. Steroids are good for ending a flare but it’s hard to get prescribed, also side effects.
What really worked for me me was * blood thinners for cognitive defects * Avoid triggers, direct sun, sugar, caffeine, spice * autoimmune protocol diet * magnesium, vit d, e, b complex, fish oil
Get blood work done for each kind. ANA test as a starting point.
For me Early Sjo test confined diagnosis.
Make a list of ALL symptoms and take it with you to all doctors. A Neuro-ophthalmologist was the first to say Sjogrens based only off my sheet.
An elimination diet is probably the best place to start. I ate nothing but sweet potatoes for a month, my symptoms all cleared up. Stated coming back when I introduced random foods.
That’s how I started following AIP diet
People complaining of fatigue or having difficulty concentrating or having brain fog are in some studies already counted as suffering from long covid. No causual relationship required.
A friend of mine is a doctor and we were chatting about long covid 2 days ago, his description of it seemed pretty cut and dried to me - e.g. a swimmer here in Glasgow with hopes of getting to the 2024 olympics is currently unable to train due to breathing issues post-covid. They’re supposed to be fully immersed in training right now but can’t since covid in December 2020.
It's just not consistent with the "It's all in their minds theory," or "it's the same as stress from isolation" theory.
There's clearly something neurological going on, and we don't understand it yet.
Was a nightmare getting those under control but my symptoms eased up. Then I got covid and it all started up again. Took months to get back to a baseline, but symptoms were identical, aside from loss of smell.
Ofcourse long covid is real. I am just a bit skeptical about the diagnosis criteria.
I really don't understand what point you tried to make.
The whole point of scientific papers is to gather and document findings in a way to be subjected to critical analysis and serve as food for thought.
From your own example, which unfortunately is completely unsubstantiated, documenting symptoms reported by patients is a good starting point to form hypothesis to be verified or rejected.