Long-COVID patients, generally speaking, have been very miserable for a very long time, and because the illness attacks their brains, their hearts, their lungs, their guts, their joints — sometimes simultaneously, sometimes intermittently, and sometimes in a chain reaction — they bounce from specialist to specialist, none of whom has the bandwidth to hear their whole frustrating ordeal together with the expertise to address all of their complaints
This article takes a look at the Long COVID clinic that has been set up at Yale Medical School and shares what doctors there are starting to find. One estimate suggests that 65 million people will suffer from Long COVID and yet, very little is known about why the illness lingers and how it can be treated. Frankly, doctors don’t even have a definitive answer on what Long COVID is.
A key fact we learned from this article – Long COVID is not a new phenomenon. As this article explains, many common viral infections including Ebola, dengue, polio, and the flu see a small percentage of patients suffer for years afterwards with symptoms that are very similar to Long COVID: extreme fatigue, brain fog, joint pain, inflammation, dizziness, sleep disruption and mood disorders. Researchers believe that this might indicate that Long COVID has less to do with COVID and more to do with the body’s response to infections generally. So the Yale clinic is focused on better understanding why common infections become chronic illnesses in a small percentage of the population. And if they can answer that question, they may end up helping far more than just Long COVID sufferers.
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