Why Exercise Doesn’t Help People With Long COVID - WebMD article by Lou Schuler (8/3/22) [article links to reviews and studies]

[Forbin]

Why Exercise Doesn’t Help People With Long COVID

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20220803/why-exercise-doesnt-help-people-with-long-covid

“We have participants in our study who had relatively mild acute symptoms and went on to have really profound decreases in their ability to exercise,” says Matt Durstenfeld, MD, a cardiologist at UCSF School of Medicine and principal author of the review.

But multiple studies have found deconditioning is not entirely – or even mostly – to blame.

But that advice [graded exercise] would be disastrous for someone who meets Putrino’s stricter definition of long COVID: “Three to 4 months out from initial infection, they’re experiencing severe fatigue, exertional symptoms, cognitive symptoms, heart palpitations, shortness of breath,” he says.

 

[ahimsa]

Mildly annoyed to see these quotes from Matt Durstenfield (a cardiologist) near the end of the article:

“My sense is that gradually increasing your exercise is still good advice for the vast majority of people,” UCSF’s Durstenfeld says.

Durstenfeld says it’s important that patients keep trying and not give up. “With slow and steady progress, a lot of people can get profoundly better,” he says.

It's possible he was talking about a much broader group of "Long Covid" patients - those who do not have PEM, and do not meet the ME/CFS diagnostic criteria, and so on - but it's not clear from the article.

 

[chrisb]

For some unexplained reason, the word dilettante comes to mind.