It should come as no surprise that an article by an author who claims that up to 80% of Long Covid can be cured by mind body therapy does not believe that LC is a real medical condition. Alan Levinovitz has been discrediting himself and
@WIRED magazine's reputation for days by arguing with and harassing LC patients and medical professionals, rather than learning from them. The article was written based on his biases and beliefs rather than up to date biomedical research. LC patients deserve accurate scientific media coverage. WIRED needs to retract this article, issue a statement of apology, and commission a new article on recent developments in LC research by interviewing patients and professionals, including viral persistence, ongoing tissue and organ disease damage, and immune dysfunction, as well as new pharmaceutical development and drug repurposing. We wrote a book on the subject if your science writers need a primer.
Zeynep — this is not like TB (or cancer, or HIV, or any of the other analogized conditions), because there is no "long Covid" in the first place. There's an extremely vague definition that could apply to a range of conditions, from post-ICU syndrome to basically every PAIS that's out there. Much of the article is dedicated to discussing the definitional problems, as well as the problems that creates for studying "the" condition in the first place. The piece isn't saying that "mind-body" therapies work, or don't work, for long Covid, or any PAIS. It's saying that right now there IS no single entity we can call "long Covid," there's just vague definitions of a family of syndromes and symptoms, which result in everything from extremely moderate to very severe illness.
Equally important, and also the point of the article: A subset of very, very ill people — and a larger subset of mild/moderate — attribute their recovery to mind-body interventions. Was it spontaneous remission? Was it "placebo"? Was it...something else? It would be great to know! But that patient group, specifically, has been of zero interest to researchers, and are actively ostracized by the advocacy world.
No one studies *recovered* LC patients who were severely ill and attribute their recovery to mind-body therapies, as, for example, they do over in ALS where the very, very few spontaneous remissions are of great interest to researchers. Instead, people like Larson and Lupi are told they are full of shit, or were never really sick, or are wrong about what caused their recovery.
That's what the article is about. Other articles can discuss other things! But those are the dynamics and themes I address. They are important. Failing to address them is holding back research on a very heterogenous and poorly defined set of conditions.