> Doctors in most places don't seem to be taking this condition seriously and believe it to be a made up thing, but COVID causing damage to bodies and brains is a very real thing.
What happened with "trust the experts"?
What happened with "trust the experts"?
I am just personally wary of diagnosing myself - what I may think of as Long Covid (because it correlates to symptoms I've read about) may just as well be something else. I have no way of knowing.
But everyone's circumstances are individual, I suppose. Especially when regular doctors are unable to help you. That's a tricky situation.
It was always lazy shorthand for “we don’t fully understand what’s going on but in general you’re probably better off by trusting the current scientific consensus,” which is a consistently good approach across time and space even if the consensus turns out to be wrong.
And for cases where there isn’t broad consensus, like the etiology of Long COVID, then obviously “trust the experts” is an almost semantically meaningless statement anyway. This is not analogous to climate change or vaccines or other areas where you hear this (again, lazy) phrase a lot.
The results were obscenely strong.
So no, not really. RCTs of that scale and with those strong of results build consensus pretty quickly, which is why there was (and remains) such strong consensus, which is why you feel like "trust the experts" was such a cudgel.
These arguments are always fun because they resolve to, "I'm mad because I wasn't trusted with subtle arguments and statistical nuance" immediately followed by a demonstrated inability to grasp exactly those things. Of course if you really wanted the subtle arguments and statistical nuance, you could've looked at the study results themselves. But you almost certainly didn't and most people wouldn't, ergo "trust the experts" who do those things is often very reasonable advice.