LMAO for anyone who hasn’t read it, this is the horrible thing Platner did to Jenny Racicot worthy of this treatment by the Free Press

Thoughtful, heartfelt response to my WIRED piece from someone deep in the long Covid ME/CFS world, who was severely ill for nearly five years with long Covid: amythetonic.substack.com/p/w…

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My latest feature for @WIRED is about long Covid. It focuses on extremely sick patients who believe they recovered, partially or fully, with the help of "mind-body therapies." But it is ALSO about why featuring these patients leads to the kind of reaction you see here:

OK, You’ve Got Me. When I Said Long Covid Could Be Treated By Talking Therapy, I Actually Meant There’s No Such Thing As Long Covid

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.

I don't think about this as some kind of "they are tearing my ass up" or not. I want people to get better, and I want the scientific community to be able to figure out what's going on with the huge variety of conditions categorized as long Covid. When the culture around it is this polarized, it holds progress back.