The Medical System Should Have Been Prepared for Long COVID
COVID long haulers have been breathlessly covered, but there’s nothing surprising about medically unexplained symptoms—or the reaction to them.
Hasnain says:
This goes far beyond COVID and is an indictment of the American healthcare system. Combine overworked doctors, a lack of trust in patients, and systemic biases against funding research into diseases that don’t commonly affect certain people and, well, this is the mess that you get.
“How could top scientists and medical professionals suffer collective amnesia about this crucial piece of information? Why weren’t we being warned about two types of potential COVID complications, acute and chronic?
The answer is simple: Our medical system is radically unequipped, practically and conceptually, to serve patients whose tests come back normal and whose chronic symptoms cannot be explained with a biological diagnosis or outsourced to a specialist.
Long COVID patients are far from the only ones in this situation. Millions of people suffer from similar chronic symptoms, many of them too debilitated to work a job or even leave their bed. They, too, have been told their symptoms are psychogenic. Those I spoke with recounted how they watched in horror as the first reports of post-COVID began to surface. They saw what was coming, even if the doctors and scientists didn’t.”
Posted on 2021-03-23T05:00:49+0000