BMJ — Long covid: the doctors’ lives destroyed by an illness they caught while doing their jobs

https://www.bmj.com/content/382/bmj.p1983

 

Harrowing article. I hoped long Covid would serve as an impetus for change but nothing has changed. What comes across clearly in these anecdotes is how you instantly lose all credibility as a person once you report fatigue and brain fog symptoms.

 

Soul crushing.

I often think about how medicine is like the military. The hierarchy the harm to people outside and inside.

 

"This is when nothing works. My brain stops working, my mouth stops working, I’ll be mid-sentence and not know where I’m going with it. I’ll be unable to get out of a chair to go to bed because I don’t have the energy to stand up. It’s like your legs are empty.”

'extreme tiredness'(?)

 

Not all cases will be clear cut, but you'd think at least the staff who were deployed to Covid wards with inadequate PPE ought to have a very good legal argument, whatever their job title. It wouldn't surprise me if proceedings followed their normal course, though (i.e., justice takes decades because successive governments erect a huge wall of inertia).

 

Ugh. At least learn the meaning of words before you use them. No wonder MDs don't understand what we mean when we say we're gaslighted when they don't even know what it means. Frankly, until it actually happens to you it's almost impossible to understand.

Zero recognition that this is an old problem. No acknowledgement that patients have been complaining about this forever. They're saying the same things we're maligned and attacked for, but they're either still oblivious to it, or unable to say it. I find it hard to have sympathy here. I have great empathy, I understand what they are going to through, but the problem is entirely in the medical profession and even those failed by it can't seem to find the courage to lay the blame where it should.

Yes, this is all political. But it is medical politics, not government politics. Without the medical profession's full complicity in this disaster, it would never have happened. None of this will change until medicine changes. It all happened as a choice, motivated and purposeful. Say it, damnit, or you're all stuck in this nightmare with us for the long run.

 

Too late, though. They've now discovered the extent to which medicine is a survival of the fittest profession: you're in it until you stumble, and then, instantly, you're nobody.

 

Exactly. This strategy of trying to dissociate themselves from us (lepers) is not going to work. The numbers affected are huge, the financial implications would be gargantuan.

 

“GPs are at their wit’s end with what’s happening to them because they have these patients that they’re desperately worried about that they can’t do anything with because nobody will see them. No one will accept their referrals.”

I noticed on some of the ME/CFS clinics that they were not taking further referrals. As many of them are also LC clinics I wonder if this is why. ie they are being inundated with requests for LC patients.

 

This appears to be the cover story for some BMJ magazine.

 

Although I don't agree their lives were destroyed by Long Covid. They were destroyed by their own profession's denial and failure with Long Covid. Denial has consequences. Consequences that have been denounced for decades. This is just a continuation of the same denial and discrimination.

There was even a recent study showing little difference between Influenza and COVID in terms of long-term illness. The only difference here is far, far more infections, even mass reinfections, which have been enabled and encouraged by the medical profession. All of which was so predictable that thousands of us did predict it.

The responsibility here is as significant as what the fossil fuel industry did to cause and enable climate change in the self-interested pursuit of profit. This is not a natural phenomenon, it is the product of human choices. The illness may have been triggered by the virus, but the destruction of lives is a wholly human failure.

 

Reply: Doctors’ lives destroyed by Long Covid: There is an overlap between long covid and ME/CFS
Alexis Gilbert consultant in health protection, patient with severe long covid

 

Maybe the subtitle to that article could be "Fear and Loathing in Long Covid", with a nod to Hunter S. Thompson.