BPS attempts at psychologizing Long Covid

rvallee said:
That's kind of a big own:

If you see in us razor-sharp and articulate people, it may be because your idea of razor-sharp and articulate is to mindlessly peddle recycled 19th century snake oil. They easily have a 100:1 advantage over us and still whine that we don't have zero.
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Auto-translate said:
And while I usually like to be told that I'm sharp and articulate, her assertion masks a rather crude preconception that sick people can't or shouldn't be.

I can, anyway. But not for long. My "lectures" were rarely more than 10 minutes.
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Editorial in a Swedish newspaper, written by a doctor, based on an infamous lecture by psychiatrist Åsa Kadowaki (who has long covid).

Kajsa Dovstad: Tänk om terapi är bästa medicinen vid postcovid
https://www.gp.se/ledare/tänk-om-terapi-är-bästa-medicinen-vid-postcovid-1.61482362

Google Translate, English
Auto-translate said:
What if therapy is the best medicine for post-covid?

There is a heated debate about whether prolonged symptoms after mild or suspected corona infections "are real or [are] an invented cultural illness", says a headline in this newspaper.

However, the crux of the matter is not whether the symptoms are physical or not, but how people can best be helped. Once dangerous and treatable disease has been ruled out, it can be counterproductive to continue focusing on the sick, Kadowaki argues in a YouTube lecture for general practitioners.

An example. Palpitations are a common and measurable phenomenon in post-covid, as well as in the aftermath of other viral diseases. The hypothesis is that the virus affects the regulation of basal body functions, leading to over-activation of the sympathetic nervous system with a consequent elevated heart rate. Let's say the hypothesis is correct.

What we also know is that the sympathetic nervous system is affected by thoughts and emotions. If a person becomes anxious about heart palpitations, the sympathetic nervous system is activated even more, which further increases heart palpitations and creates even more anxiety and discomfort. It becomes impossible to distinguish between the physical and the psychological components of palpitations. And it doesn't matter. Neither palpitations, nor most other symptoms of sympathetic activation and post-covid, are dangerous.

A vicious circle can be difficult to break. The brain is designed to detect threats, and then avoid them. Eventually, modest physiological reactions such as an elevated heart rate or a slight rise in body temperature can become so troublesome that the slightest impact is avoided. Everyday life becomes insurmountable. [...]

During the lecture, Kadowaki gives advice to primary care physicians on how to avoid sympathetic activation themselves. Indeed, meeting people in great distress, who want to investigate and investigate and not hear that therapy could at least reduce the psychological component, is so stressful that the doctors themselves need the help of therapeutic methods.
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Long Covid has exposed how medicine truly has no clue how to deal with illness, has genuinely built no understanding of it whatsoever. Either the patient gets better or dies, nothing else is understood, does not compute. Illness is this impossible-to-understand thing on which the serious work has yet to begin, but is always obstructed because blah-blah mind-body blah-blah. Literally half the job and it's no better than in the days of Hippocrates himself, possibly worse. Which is also the case of complex concepts like justice and fairness, but still.

If only this revelation mattered, instead of reinforcing the very problem that caused it in the first place. It's like watching a metaphorical sausage factory except it's way more gory and nauseating. I'm borderline about to find a reason to survive this only to bring this whole broken ass-system down and fix it. Because I've never felt more intense hopelessness than seeing medicine do its thing and flailing and failing all the way, with participation trophies and all. It's truly revolting.
 
rvallee said:
Long Covid has exposed how medicine truly has no clue how to deal with illness, has genuinely built no understanding of it whatsoever. Either the patient gets better or dies, nothing else is understood, does not compute.
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While I sympathise with the feelings of despair expressed in this post, I can't agree with this opening statement.

I have just been reading about the pressure hospital staff are under as yet another wave of Covid is filling hospitals in the UK, while staff shortages, exhaustion and sick leave have depleted staff so much that they are dreading the coming months and wondering how those who are left will cope.

Thousands of clinical staff have been putting their lives on the line for nearly 2 years now working long hours in very difficult conditions, dedicated to caring for the sick. Others are doing their best to provide what care and support they can for people with Long covid while struggling to find what can really help patients. Some clinicians and scientists go to extraordinary lengths to dedicate all their effort to improving understanding of disease and to find better treatments.

I think we need to be careful not to sweep all clinical and research workers up in general condemnation, however angry we feel.
 
Trish said:
I think we need to be careful not to sweep all clinical and research workers up in general condemnation, however angry we feel.
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Yes. I, along with many others I'm sure, would be fearful if I or my loved ones had to go into hospital for any reason, given the risks of contracting Covid whilst in there. And yet so many NHS staff are putting themselves at risk voluntarily day after day, and now year after year, knowing the risks they face. No matter how good the precautions may be they can never be perfect, so constant exposure inevitably means the risks are still relatively high for them - and they must know it.
 
Trish said:
While I sympathise with the feelings of despair expressed in this post, I can't agree with this opening statement.

I have just been reading about the pressure hospital staff are under as yet another wave of Covid is filling hospitals in the UK, while staff shortages, exhaustion and sick leave have depleted staff so much that they are dreading the coming months and wondering how those who are left will cope.

Thousands of clinical staff have been putting their lives on the line for nearly 2 years now working long hours in very difficult conditions, dedicated to caring for the sick. Others are doing their best to provide what care and support they can for people with Long covid while struggling to find what can really help patients. Some clinicians and scientists go to extraordinary lengths to dedicate all their effort to improving understanding of disease and to find better treatments.

I think we need to be careful not to sweep all clinical and research workers up in general condemnation, however angry we feel.
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Those things are not incompatible. Not understanding something and working very hard at it, the wrong way, is pretty much the problem, it's pretty much the whole work hard vs work smart thing. But it remains that when all medicine has to work with is symptoms, there's just paralysis when the usual tools fail. The usual tools sometimes work, here they all fail. Same as with us.

Illness is subjective. Medicine wants objective things to work with, it just can't accept the gap between those, the one where we are still trapped. This hasn't changed, there is still basically no understanding of what illness is, because it's an experience other people have. This still needs to change, it hasn't even begun yet. Long Covid is the test of that, the gauge. It hasn't shifted from red to green yet. I will be ecstatic when that happens, but I won't pretend to see something that isn't there.
 
Was reading through this (also posted elsewhere)
https://www.kqed.org/news/11899845/...-explain-symptoms-and-answer-common-questions

This is from a neurologist now training to be a psychiatrist at University of California, San Francisco
Is Long COVID-19 psychosomatic?
Juliet Morgan: We have to be very humble when discussing mental health and long COVID because, at least from the patients I've taken care of, I can't imagine that this is entirely generated by a primary psychiatric illness. We also know that there are these abnormal markers when we are looking at research studies that suggest that there's more going on beyond psychiatric manifestations.

It's hard for an ailing body not to then generate an ailing emotional response. I haven't taken care of a long COVID patient who doesn't have anxiety and depression. Many people who had anxiety and depression before they had long COVID have experienced worsened symptoms.
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Always worried when people say they are very humble, usually not. Why would she even bring up humility except seeing medicine from an exhalted position and patients as objects. “I can’t imagine” - means you can imagine and actually do think it is a primary psych illness. Acknowledges the inflammatory markers etc, then ignores them, so confirms to the audience it is psychosomatic.

“Ailing emotional response” what sort of group speak is this? Never heard this term before. Is this some new BPS term for “sickness behaviour” somewhat sanitised but still offensive? Anxiety and depression is common in the general population. No awareness that being ill makes you feel anxious about the future/work etc.
 
hibiscuswahine said:
Was reading through this (also posted elsewhere)
https://www.kqed.org/news/11899845/...-explain-symptoms-and-answer-common-questions

This is from a neurologist now training to be a psychiatrist at University of California, San Francisco

Always worried when people say they are very humble, usually not. Why would she even bring up humility except seeing medicine from an exhalted position and patients as objects. “I can’t imagine” - means you can imagine and actually do think it is a primary psych illness. Acknowledges the inflammatory markers etc, then ignores them, so confirms to the audience it is psychosomatic.

“Ailing emotional response” what sort of group speak is this? Never heard this term before. Is this some new BPS term for “sickness behaviour” somewhat sanitised but still offensive? Anxiety and depression is common in the general population. No awareness that being ill makes you feel anxious about the future/work etc.
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Humble One.

Have you come for us?

Sacrifice. You make us.

Capitalise. Make us suspect.

Capture. Only injured and sick.

Explain. Our unfitness for relationship with our own bodies

Only you. May know us now.

Extract. Information from us.

Consume. Our desire to live.

Cannibalise. Feast on our flesh.

We are dust we are dirt.

You, are not a person of interest.

Too trite, too tiresome, too much of a bore.

The net of your attention, tightens around your subjects.

No one watches.

The Humble One un-humbled.
 
Merged thread

Negative comments about ME/CFS, Fibromyalgia, Long Covid on the Tucker Carlson Tonight show on Fox on Jan 5

Someone posted this as a comment on my Instagram account recently.

I hadn’t heard this but looks like there were very inappropriate comments on #LongCovid, #ChronicFatigueSyndrome, #Fibromyalgia, etc. on the Tucker Carlson Tonight show on Fox on Jan 5

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Tucker Carlson is all about manufactured culture wars and inciting people to rage with lies, half-lies and twisted facts.

I don't want to insult those who watch his show, so I won't say more about the folly of expecting him to do better, but this is probably a wake up call to those who watched his show.

There's one thing I will say about Carlson: he's relatively consistent. He's usually equally wrong, and badly so, about everything.
 
Everything in America is political — unfortunately long Covid will likely become part of the right v left culture war. This is way beyond our control, obvi. The country is tearing itself apart.

Their fear of “welfare for the rest of their lives” is a common GOP talking point and bullshit based on the system in place. In the US there are two types of payments, Social security disability insurance (SSDI) which is not welfare, it’s an insurance program that all workers pay into during their working lives and pays out based on the amount YOU have paid in. The only welfare program is SSI, and it is a pittance and based on recipients proving they are absolutely poverty stricken w almost no assets. The US is far from introducing UBI, especially given how inflation has taken off largely from the pandemic payments made to all citizens earning under a certain amount.
 
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