A new Piece written in Time titled
"Long COVID Reseearch Needs a Radical New Approach"- “How to End the Futile Blame Game Over Failed Long COVID Research” has been published.
The article uses ME/CFS as example why there should be less biomedical research and instead a focus on things such as “social science research on actionable solutions applicable to at-risk subgroups”.
Aka “Biomedical research into ME/CFS has been historically underfunded and neglected leading to a disastrous outcome. Since LC is similar one should apply the same unsuccessful strategy here. Our Radical New Approach is the same old approach that is ineffective with every other disease."
The complete and utter ignoring of reality and the lack of any sensical argumentation continues…
Damn. What an incredibly naive, and wrong, take. It basically frames science as a belief, rather than a process, and assumes that just caring about the patients will somehow work out. Science always works out in the end, and more often than not it appears not to until it does. But you have to put in a proper effort, and that never happened, and is still not happening. The vast majority of Long Covid research is about trying to find things they already know, they seem unable to think outside of their textbooks.
It's clear that the authors mean well, but it's delusional to think that medicine can achieve anything here with the failed biopsychosocial approach, the very thing that failed. We know this for a fact, it's astounding that they actually use the textbook example of this failure as the model in ME/CFS. This approach has failed miserably with us, and biomedical research has been disastrous largely because of the same attitude expressed in the article: what if it's all for nothing, what if we find nothing? This attitude pervades everything, and sets it all for failure.
Well, then, why do we even bother doing scientific research if the answers don't come easily? Oddly enough, they still present the current paradigm as a novel approach, old wine in the same old bottles. You could hardly find a better example of why "nothing about us without us" is so critical moving forward. When the experts basically mope around whining about how it's so hard and what if they do all this work and find nothing, should it be any surprise that they failed after barely trying? And yet all this biopsychosocial approach truly has been for nothing, and will be for nothing, and it somehow doesn't bother them.
Barely trying for a long time does not add up to the same thing as trying for even a fraction of that time. You could do 1% effort for a century and it would only amount to one year of 100% effort, and 1% is generous here. It all obviously adds up to failure.
And actually there needs to be far more blame here. Experts have failed millions miserably, causing not only a major crisis of suffering, but feeding into the crisis of credibility that plagues clinical research and is stalling progress overall in the discipline. When professionals fail, in every profession but medicine they get heavily blamed. Being a professional isn't just about training, it's especially about responsibility and accountability. In fact it's precisely the lack of any blame for those decades of barely trying that lead to this level of complacency and, ultimately, to failure.
It's a great example of Einstein's quote about insanity being doing the same thing and expecting different results. Medicine really has a lot to learn from humanities, it's too closed off to thinking outside the ideological bubble, and being so walled-off like this has actually lead to their attempts at thinking outside the bubble, like the biopsychosocial model, being even worse than nothing at all.
The patients were right all along. The experts were wrong all along. This is a set of unique circumstances that force a different approach, certainly not one that relies on blindly trusting that the people who got it all wrong will somehow get it right doing the very things that failed. Yet again. And again. And again and again. It's truly baffling seeing this much commitment to being wrong.
