Long Covid Exercise programme by Norwegian physiotherapist Marianne Svanevik

Discovered this new website in English launching a treatment programme for Long Covid patients.

It's by Marianne Svanevik, a physiotherapist who has treated ME for years with GET and CBT. She's a proponent of Lightning Process and I remember she was furious on the journal for Norwegian Physiotherapists several years ago when they wrote an article about the criticism of the PACE trial.

Seems she wants to reach an international audience as it is in English, perhaps particularly in USA? Her treatment is $299 for the first month and then $199 for "as long as you want our support".

https://www.covidrecovery.co/

 

Amazing. Just a pure grift industry. And this stuff is available for free.

Medicine is truly the biggest single producer of pseudoscience in the world. What a time to be alive.

 

Marianne and Bjarte Bakken made quite the splash in a Norwegian LC group a while back. People quickly dug up her LP-background.

The core of the program is very simple: create a schedule that you can manage, stick to it and wait for symptoms to stabilize, increase a small amount, wait for stabilization, repeat.

It also includes some more sane aspects, like starting the day very slowly. You’re also not allowed to deviate by doing more. My speculation is that this is what some people might benefit from - it gets them to really give up things they might have been too sick to do in the first place.

There’s a recent article about them at bt.no, it’s paywalled: https://www.bt.no/btmagasinet/i/LMd...lger-etter-korona-ingen-veit-kor-mange-dei-er

Bjarte got Covid late 2022, and he’s still not recovered. He says he can walk 30 minutes at a regular pace daily. He has been doing the program since the summer 2023, so for about 18 months. I’m not sure I would claim success based on his results. There’s also natural recovery to consider, he’s barely two years into LC.

He says that he used to think that people needed to get their act together, but that he has learned that he was wrong. Yet at their website, he says this:

Just before, they note that 5 of the 12 initial participants quit in three months, and that the others were thriving.

 

Just adding a quote from the article, showing that Svanevik's approach sadly seems to make sense for others too:

In Bergen, several physiotherapists offer treatment to patients with long-term COVID, by agreement with the municipality.

Silje Marie Midtun Alexandrova is one of them. She offers group courses with ten patients over eight weeks. Information about the disease, energy use in the body, breathing techniques, relaxation and sleep are on the schedule.

She is not sure of the effect of the course, but she feels that many people get better.

– Patients who manage to change how they think about the disease, not to check in so much on all the symptoms all the time, will often experience change. Some are given strategies that they can use.

Conveying hope is important to her.

– Many who come here have a tough time. I am emphasising that there is nothing that indicates that the condition will last forever.

 

Give her a 'feel' of delayed PEM and see how that goes, then get back to us.

 

This is like telling cancer patients there’s nothing that indicates they will die.

Obviously it won’t last forever for everybody, and cancer doesn’t have a 100% death rate, but they are basically in both cases telling patients what they want to hear instead of the more nuanced truth, which is unethical.

 

The thing is that Marianne takes a relatively gentle approach to increased activity. Because if you get symptoms form increasing, you go back to the previous level and try to increase a bit less the next time. The issue is obviously that they are increasing in order to create an improvement. Which is nonsense.

The program starts with reducing activity. But she also states that you can expect a full recovery, but it might take time. And crucially, if you drop out, it’s because you were not strong enough or motivated enough to do it.

The sum of it is completely missguided, but individual elements might be of use to some.

From the website:

Three Steps to Recover
There are three steps you have to go through to recover from Long COVID:

1. Rest: Reduce your activity level and avoid stress.
2. Rebuild: Increase your activity level gradually.
3. Solidify: Build robustness to avoid relapse.

In the Rest phase, we stop you from having crashes/symptom increases and make your body ready for growth. You achieve this by reducing your activity level dramatically and avoiding stress.

In the Rebuild phase, we gradually increase your activity level by 10-20% every two weeks. When your body responds well to the increase, we keep increasing every two weeks, when it doesn’t, we reduce the activity level a bit and increase it a bit less two weeks later.

In the Solidify phase, we make your body robust so that you don’t relapse. We achieve this by making sure you avoid big negative stressors and don’t ramp up exercise too quickly.

 

Absolutely!

I’m just puzzled by the initial reduction in activity and the willingness to go back to a lower level of activity. She seems to actually put weight on avoiding too severe symptoms, i.e. saying that symptoms are bad. In that regard, it’s quite different from the standard GET of just ignoring them.

 

The Norwegian Covid Association (NCF) has shared the article on social media.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/15mzLoidMN/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Tusen takk til dere (Bjarte, Ina, og Torunn) som står fram og gir long covid et ansikt i denne artikkelen fra BT (1. mars 2025)

AI translated:
Many thanks to you (Bjarte, Ina, and Torunn) for coming forward and giving long covid a face in this article from BT (March 1, 2025)