I hate self promotion, especially right now, but I just have to link my starred review over @PublishersWkly because I am so damn honored. This is one of those dreams that you don't ever expect to actually happen. Never stop writing, my friends. bit.ly/3e1rZcY

‼️⚠️Please read this until the end. A widely shared article has presented a deeply misleading view of Long COVID, suggesting once again that cognitive behavioral therapy, exercise, and “mind-body” approaches may be the uncomfortable truth patients refuse to accept. This needs to be challenged. Not because the nervous system does not matter. Not because psychological support cannot help. But because confusing support with cure, physiology with psychology, and heterogeneity with “it might be in your head” is exactly how medicine has harmed post-infectious patients for decades. There are articles about Long COVID that look like science journalism, but in reality they repackage, in modern language, a very old idea: if we do not fully understand a disease, maybe the problem is in the patient’s mind. And that is not science. That is repeating history. The article begins with a striking sentence: “There isn’t a single approved pharmaceutical treatment, not even a test to verify the presence of the illness.” This may sound forceful, but it is a very misleading way of presenting the problem. The fact that there is still no drug specifically approved for Long COVID, or a single diagnostic test, does not mean that “nothing has been found.” It means that we are dealing with a heterogeneous disease, probably with several biological subgroups, and that medicine has not yet converted those findings into validated clinical tools. “No single diagnostic biomarker” is not the same as “no biology.” In just a few years, immunological, vascular, neurological, endocrine, and metabolic abnormalities have been described in subgroups of Long COVID patients: autonomic dysfunction, herpesvirus reactivations such as EBV/HHV-6, alterations in the cortisol axis, autoantibodies against GPCR receptors — including adrenergic and muscarinic receptors — persistent viral antigens, endothelial damage, muscle abnormalities after exertion, mitochondrial dysfunction, persistent inflammation, and differential immune changes. Is everything settled? No. Does that mean it is psychological? Also no. Science does not work like that. Multiple sclerosis did not stop existing before we had MRI. Many autoimmune diseases do not show up in routine blood tests. If a complete blood count, a basic biochemistry panel, or an X-ray comes back “normal, normal, normal,” that does not prove the absence of disease. It only proves that you are looking with inadequate tools. One of the article’s most serious mistakes is this: it confuses the absence of a simple clinical test with the absence of organic disease. And that mistake has caused harm for decades. The article also says: “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.” No. That is not correct. A hypothesis is a provisional explanation. But when you compare patients and controls and find significant differences in muscle tissue, metabolism, response to exertion, immune biomarkers, viral antigens, autoantibodies, or vascular dysfunction, you are no longer talking about “little more than hypotheses.” You are talking about lines of biomedical evidence that still need to be organized, replicated, stratified, and translated into treatments. That is not scientific failure. That is research into a complex and new disease. 🔵Continued in the next post.👇🏻 (1/6)

This is amazing research at the forefront of untangling the biomedical roots of Long Covid. Maybe @WIRED could report on this instead of platforming anti-science quacks.

Ok. I've read "The Painful Truth About Long Covid" six times through, and I'm ready. Here are ten clues in the article that point to the writer's bad faith.

Excited to get this out in preprint: triple-blind, placebo-controlled microtesla magnetic therapy (MMT) is safe, feasible and effective in reducing cognitive impairment in people with #LongCOVID. I get excited about interventions for cognitive symptoms medrxiv.org/content/10.64898… 1/

1/ If I hear one more public official call indoor air filters a "band-aid," I'm going to explode! It's so logical, yet so readily dismissed. Filtering indoor air should be as standard as filtering water. Full stop. 🧵

"Tirzepatide has given me an 85% improvement after 15 years of moderate to severe #MECFS and trialing 20 other meds that either didn't work or only gave me a 1-3% improvement." reddit.com/r/cfs/comments/1r…

Yale scientists reviewed 100 years of records and found that Long COVID is part of a larger pattern. Viruses like polio, SARS, and EBV have long caused lasting illness in some people, often through immune dysfunction cell.com/trends/immunology/f…

My new favorite game: after reading any post that mentions the words long covid, I like to try and guess how many replies it will be until the first “it’s the jab” shows up. Apparently if you say the magic words they appear as if conjured by the magical troll fairy.

Been a long while since I posted. Mestinon has recently moved the needle for me a bit but I’m still mostly housebound (and always masking when I go out.) In good news I’m almost done with my next book. Fingers crossed it sells!!!!

After a long wait, our longitudinal long COVID study is finally published in @NatureComms: nature.com/articles/s41467-0…. We find a skeletal muscle alterations in patients with #longcovid, which worsen with exercise. 1/n

Long Covid Is Real — And It’s Changing an Entire Generation Hundreds of thousands of kids in America are struggling with an illness that many doctors and schools refuse to recognize.e Feature: rollingstone.com/culture/cul…

Therapy helps but let’s be clear. You can’t CBT your way out of capitalism. You can’t mindfulness your way out of racism. You can’t self care your way out of oppression. You can’t journal your way out of ableism. This isn’t about coping, it’s about deconstructing the systems.

🧠 Thread: A molecular clue to Long COVID “brain fog” 1/ New study from Yokohama City Univ used PET imaging of AMPA receptors. Long COVID patients showed elevated AMPAR levels, linked to both cognitive impairment and inflammation. A molecular biomarker emerges.

A few days out from #UNGA80, I wanted to reflect on the session we took part in and the media responses since. Mount Sinai was one of the 150 organizations that signed the global pledge to advocate for healthy indoor air. The event itself featured four panels of speakers who 1/

I do still think this article is a turning point. bmj.com/content/390/bmj.r173…

New from @PutrinoLab & Dr. Pridgen: A combo of 120 days of celecoxib & valacyclovir with 15 days of Paxlovid is significantly more effective than celecoxib & valacyclovir alone! The combo had vastly greater response rates for brain fog, dysautonomia, & fatigue. #LongCovid 1/

Traveling? The U.S. is experiencing a summer COVID-19 surge. Lower your chance of catching COVID-19 by masking in indoor public places like airports and planes. Wear a high-quality mask like an N95, KN95 or KF94 to stay protected. Learn more: cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCD…

Incredibly exciting diagnostic tool potential — @ImmunoFever MIT team is doing nailfold capillaroscopies on #LongCovid patients before and after a NASA lean test, and said the results have been incredibly striking compared to controls. My results were very abnormal !

Kicking off #KeystoneSympsoia with a room full of masks led by @VirusesImmunity & @MichaelPelusoMD🙏 #LongCovid

He died from Long COVID today. His words: “I’ve experienced more discrimination and stigma for being openly disabled by #LongCovid than I ever did for being openly gay” When will the gaslighting stop? How many more need to die?