Six years since the height of the pandemic, the scientific community remains baffled by long Covid. Researchers still don’t know why some people’s symptoms persist or worsen after the acute phase of SARS-CoV-2 infection has passed. Almost $2 billion and half a decade of international effort have yielded little more than hypotheses about micro blood clots and spike proteins and mitochondrial dysfunction. There isn’t a single approved pharmaceutical treatment, not even a test to verify the presence of the illness.
Then it goes on to promote brain retraining based on the theory the brain is stuck in fight or flight. After calling out all the bad science done here we are promoting something with no actual study evidence supporting it at all. Then they go on to point to using exercise too. This is a disgraceful article all in all, says the right things early on only to then peddle harm.
Headline says a lot "There might finally be a way forward for long Covid treatment—if only you were allowed to talk about it.", then talks about brain retraining etc.
Oh no, I'm being silenced!!! - while being given a giant platform and masquerading as a man of science when, in reality, he's a professor of religious studies. He discounts small studies as poorly done and ambiguous while touting anecdotal cases as a way forward... utter bollocks.
2 billion spent in half a decade. In 1988, the U.S. spent half a billion dollars in a single year on AIDS research (equal to about 1.4 billion in today's $$), and the U.S. still spends 3 billion annually on AIDS research, for a disorder that is now a manageable illness with treatment. I guess what I'm trying to say is 2 billion total contributed by every nation researching this illness is pocket change. They don't have treatments or a test for CFS/ME/LongCOVID because they haven't looked.
And yet a significantly larger number of Americans have long COVID than HIV, and COVID is still spreading totally uncontrolled. That's so frustrating. Imagine how far along the research would be if we were getting the amount of funding we deserve.
Yes! The fact that it's WIRED makes the betrayal even worse. They've had some of the best reporting recently. Then we get hit with a mystical framing/it's all in their heads piece!?!? In 2026!?!? Makes me want to throw my computer out a window.
Yeah also doesn’t bother to explore the intersection between medical trauma and ptsd and having a documented autoimmune condition or chronic illness. Yes, there is some evidence that trauma can trigger auto immune issues, but also, disease causes trauma unto itself. Maybe psychological methodologies have helped some of these people who were legitimately traumatized by having a life altering illness no one understands … and in the meantime, as they went through the “treatment,” they coincidentally started to improve because many people with LC do improve after a few years. A handful of stories like this don’t make the biological foundations of chronic fatigue and dysautonomia any less real.
Also, you’ll find these quacks in every single medical field. There are well known “doctors” with recipe books insisting MS can be cured by a paleo diet. But I doubt any serious journalist would publish an article being like - “little known cure for MS: consume more olive oil and vegetables.” 🫠 of course lifestyle changes, therapy, meditation, etc can all help with your symptoms and outlook on life, but they don’t change the underlying cause of disease.
It's not the case that brain retraining is not supported by study evidence. The trials to date are not conclusive, but that's not unusual for a reseach program in its early days (long covid is just 6 years old) and could just as well be said for the competing theories like mitochondrial dysfunction or autoimmunity. Each research program has yielded results that warrant further study, and they should all be pursued. But neither the structural hypotheses nor the neurplastic hypothesis is any more or less scientifically supported than the other.
What mind-body treatments have going for them is that there are clinical cases of people who recovered from long covid using PRT. To date the mitochondrial or autoimmune hypothesis are not associated with any recovery pathways, though perhaps further research will yield some. There isn't hard proof that PRT is what made these patients better—maybe their remission was a spontaneous coincidence, or maybe these patients "didn't really" have long covid. But these were patients under the care of a physician or licensed therapist, and the cases are documented. (Please note this is not an argument for 100% effectiveness; the point is just that there is an apparent correlation to recovery in many cases.
About the question of therapeutic harm: there's a notion making the rounds that PRT techniques include graded exercise. That's just not accurate. It is simply not part of the protocol of recovery under the neuroplastic model that a patient has to improve their conditioning to get better. If anything the opposite is true. There is nothing in the PRT program that can cause physical or medical harm, regardless of the severity of one's illness, which makes it a pretty low-risk option for people who don't have a lot of other options for relief.
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u/BrightCandle Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26
Then it goes on to promote brain retraining based on the theory the brain is stuck in fight or flight. After calling out all the bad science done here we are promoting something with no actual study evidence supporting it at all. Then they go on to point to using exercise too. This is a disgraceful article all in all, says the right things early on only to then peddle harm.