This article is framed in such an odd way. As if the virus that literally uses the ACE2 receptor for cell entry wouldn't have cardiovascular effects or if they were not known and assumed immediately. That's wild. The article itself doesn't even have the letter sequence "ACE2" in it... Of course binding to ACE2 is going to throw the cardiovascular Renin/Angiotensin system all out of wack. Even if the sars-cov-2 virus weren't specifically entering and killing off ACE2 expressing cardiovascular cells.
I think it’s an article targeted at laypeople, many of whom consider COVID to be a respiratory disease like the flu. It’s simply spreading awareness of the fact that it’s more complicated than that.
> Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2)[2] is a strain of coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the respiratory illness responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic
On the flip-side, we know we're easily fooled and that the scientific method is a barely sufficient set of tools to be fooled a lot less.
There was a sea of preprints pointing in different directions, and it was difficult to navigate and know whom to believe.
Someone believing something strongly 3 years ago based on a few preprints is hardly vindicated for having great process when published research comes out validating that view now.
IMO the only approach is to roll with the punches and to go "ehhhhh, mayyyybe." (And of course use the best weight of information we have now).
> There was a sea of preprints pointing in different directions, and it was difficult to navigate and know whom to believe.
right, this was only obvious with particular education instead of relying on the educated, who were saying all sorts of random things in every direction.
> this was only obvious with particular education instead of relying on the educated,
Hindsight bias. We tend to remember our intuitions when we were right, instead of fairly measuring them. Thus, we become convinced we are reliable and experts are not.
Damage to other tissues, especially from mild illness, was a possibility that was neither well-supported nor well-refuted in 2020. It was clear there was morbidity risk, but the mechanism was not understood (and is still not well-understood) and the magnitude was also uncertain and confounded.
I try to be aware of blind spots by subjecting myself to the same tests I put others through
In this case, I started keeping logs of what people said what across social media. I noticed that they never revisit their theories and just go on to the next one. In one example, the people calling the existence of the virus fictional were same people that were having 5g hysteria for the next year, some of the same people that moved to theories that required the existence of that virus but to stick with issues about the vaccine. Everyone that took the vaccine is supposed to have dropped dead by now according to many individuals theories. But these are not being revisited, there is no “I was wrong about that” “what happened to 5g” “how come only a couple people have myocarditis problems in 2023 instead of 75% of the population, or more since the actual virus does the same thing” its just on to the next one
so I try to revisit which theories I made to at least address them
Never seen the hashtag #SuddenlyAndUnexpected used to blame every sudden (heart related) death to the Corona vaccines because the virus as such is harmless and just a flu or cold?
> People just have strange memories and attention windows.
Indeed, but IMHO the strangeness is in you (and many others): How do you are you still calling this behavior "strange" - as if it's inexplicable - after seeing it right in front of your nose for years (in many areas, not just covid)?
Think of it this way: I can predict when this behavior will occur (though not its precise presentation). So can you. What predicts - what strongly correlates with - this behavior of theirs?
\
\
\
\
\
\
(Answer, obscured to prevent accidental reading: xreactionaryxpoliticsx.xthexreactionaryxmovementxfabricatesxwhateverxsuitsxtheirxideologicalxgoalsx;xtruthxandxconsequencesx,xincludingxhumanxlifex,xarexdisregarded.xwhenxthexmovementxturnedxagainstxcoronavirusx(toxbexantiliberal)xixhadxnoxdoubtxwhatxwasxcoming).
It's probably not surprising that it happens to some extent (like, you get flat earthers and FotLs/SovCits and various other loonies), but more how _common_ it is. It has to be one of this century's most widespread conspiracy theories.
I'm not talking about random 'loonies', but a large movement that follows the same playbook every time - probably the most influential social force of the day, electing US presidents and other world leaders, oppressing people worldwide, causing mass social change, etc. They follow the same playbook, with the same rhetorical tactics, every time! Look at the reactionary (sometimes called populist) political messaging in country after country - it's like it's written by the same person.
> It has to be one of this century's most widespread conspiracy theories.
The same group of people believe all sorts of conspiracy theories.
You are right about one thing, it isn't strange in the sense that it is unusual. It is in fact nearly universal.
Being too dead set in opinions not well supported is always error but only sometimes a problem. IMO, that latter part is a big part of why it can be so difficult to correct.
Friend of a friend dropped dead of a blood clot after a "cold" in something like May 2020 when testing was extraordinarily difficult to get. We immediately suspected COVID due to already knowing about the clotting/cardiovascular symptoms of COVID.
The flu is not a harmless disease, get that into your head. We have been vaccinating against the flu for decades, and yet there are about 400,000 deaths per year during an average influenza season.
The flu shot is called a shot because it isn't one vaccine, it's multiple at once.
The low efficacy is, at least in part, because every spring they make an educated guess as to which ones would be best to put into the shot distributed in the fall. Not all of them can be put into the shot for cost and compatibility reasons.
The flu shot is called a shot because... it's a shot. (See also: "jab".)
One might get allergy shots (no vaccine at all). One might get a shot of morphine in an ambulance. Liquid injections have been known as shots since before we had vaccines.
The article does not appear to be claiming that SARS-CoV-2 damages the heart directly. From the article:
"Research has since shown that myocytes for the most part escape infection. Instead, SARS-CoV-2 damages the heart indirectly by unleashing inflammatory reactions that affect cardiovascular functioning."
The popular narrative, including that being pushed by most western governments, is that COVID either never was or is no longer is dangerous, beyond the level of other common respiratory illnesses. This article begins from that (false) framing.
Is that false? I thought that that was the understanding from the get go, that for most people or was fine but that it was dangerous for certain people with pre-existibg respiratory issues, of whom there were enough that their sudden and widespread hospital admittance put a strain on the health service as a whole, meaning that all sorts of other issues that were normally easily treated became considerably more dangerous due to a lack of staff/facilities.
The "long Covid" or long term health effects are missing from that narrative. And these can be unrelated to respiratory issues, like the heart issues. And the set who suffer from "long Covid" does not seem to be correlated with those with respiratory pre-existing conditions.
> thought that that was the understanding from the get go
There were many get go’s, and one for each variant. I know a healthy person who got the original and then delta variant, the latter which attacked his pancreas and left him with type 1 diabetes.
> for most people or was fine but that it was dangerous for certain people with pre-existibg respiratory issues
For most people, it’s asymptomatic in the short term. We’ve known it would have novel systemic effects from the “get go,” because it hits a nasty receptor. With the flu, a cytokine storm and non-respiratory cellular damage is a fluke. With Covid, every infection—even the asymptomatic ones—damage the gut, testes, gallbladder and heart (ACE2).
We don’t know how that damage manifests in the long run, there hasn’t been a long run. But we know there is damage being accumulated. We just don’t know if it’s benign. (You can’t generally look at a body and tell how many times it’s had the flu. You can with Covid.)
Thanks for the info, there's definitely a few things in there I'll be looking up. By "get go" I meant circa March 2020 when it began to affect legislation fwiw.
Unsurprised that this got no response. I linger around groups that take this hardline view, and the overwhelming consensus there is that Covid is a permanently debilitating disease and that the aggregate damage the gp is talking about is a certainty.
This is posted on a lot of the social media that prays on people with medical anxiety. Nothing credible is ever provided.
There are two sides to every polarizing issue like this. In this case, the Covid doesn’t exist crowd are loud and the Covid irreparably damages you crowd are hunkered down in their homes and sticking to their in group.
The risk of death for otherwise healthy people has always been low, yes. The long-term consequences were originally unknown and are still now unclear, and a lot of people and institutions have chosen to interpret that as "fine." I'd give it a decade before making confident assertions about how fine it is though.
The "understanding" from politicians at the beginning was that everyone was highly susceptible, which was why the lockdowns were universal instead of going for targeted protection. They were just plain wrong.
We seem to remember it differently. As far as I understood it, the health workers were pushing for general lockdown in order to stop the spread overwhelming the services for everyone. Everyone was at risk in the sense that what would have normally been minor issues would have become serious with no one or no facility to treat them.
I don't think that was the belief at first, I guess it is now, though. If I recall correctly, prior to the vaccine, the mortality and hospitalization rates among even healthy adults were still quite high. I also recall plenty of reported long-term side effects, like originally active people getting winded by a staircase for weeks after.
Weren't the mortality rates something like 1% for adults? I remember being shocked by the numerical consequences of the "just infect everyone and get it over with" plans floated by some governments.
Right, but it’s well known that mortality predictions for novel diseases are inflated, often by virtue of missing people who don’t have symptoms they care about enough to let anyone know.
I forget who the statistician was that accurately predicted the mortality rate of the initial variants by just scaling the predictions down.
Mortality of subsequent variants trends down on average because of selection pressures.
> this may be a clever way of deflecting the blame from the vaccines causing heart damage
My understanding is the effects are different. The vaccine-caused effects manifest in the young and are not understood. We can’t predict it nor even really detect it in autopsy and just see it after the fact as a statistical ghost. The exposure-caused damage is generally studied in the unvaccinated population; it creates measurable damage. (The recurring confounding variable is income and education; the unvaccinated are poorer and less educated, both within the country and globally.)
Considering the reports of vaccine damage being under reported (or not reported at all) and massive over estimating of deaths and damage caused by covid (exacerbated by government funding influencing reporting) how could we ever test for the differences accurately?
The article states that doctors observed an increased rate of cardiac injuries in COVID-19 patients in early 2020, well before vaccines were available.
please read the article and use some critical thinking. it goes into detail about how the virus works and lingers as well as goes into data from well before the development of the first covid vaccine.
as long as we're completely making up causes for the heart damage which conflict with the very article we're commenting on, I submit that it's caused by angry, invisible unicorns, an explanation as likely and supported by the evidence as yours
to wit, this article may be a way of deflecting the blame from the angry, invisible unicorns causing heart damage
edit: I can't help but imagine scientists typing lab data into a computer, and some random dude off the street who knows nothing about epidemiology is standing in the corner shouting "stop rushing!!! slow down!!!", and the scientist glances over annoyedly and slows down their typing slightly
Covid can be viewed as a metabolic disease. Not only because it may directly reduce the amount of oxygen in the blood, but also because it creates tons of inflammation and oxidative stress, and that stress seems to affect cells and their energy producing apparatus (mitochondria), causing damages. Those acquired damages inhibit the production of sufficient amounts of energy (ATP). As a consequence, this creates a fertile ground for other pathologies: neurological, cardiac, gastrointestinal, endocrine, autoimmune. In many ways, post-covid is similar to the effects created by beriberi and pellagra diseases.
The worst thing is that the incidence of post-covid is hard to predict as it does not depend on severity of the initial disease. If you had a covid, you should be very attentive to a possible onset of post-viral symptoms.
> If you had a covid, you should be very attentive to a possible onset of post-viral symptoms.
Why? This might cause more harm than good, and if it's something that turns out bad enough, you probably don't need to be particularly attentive to notice it.
To avoid wasting precious time. If left untreated, post-covid may make person's life miserable, full of pain, suffering, chronic fatigue, and inability to work.
There is no standard treatment yet, but things that treat beriberi and pellagra do seem to work for post-covid as well, to some degree.
what are some good post-covid treatments? I seem to be having symptoms of depression after covid. WebMD says a thiamine-rich diet is good to treat beri beri, but not sure if "eating better" can help me out here.
When the condition enters a pathological state, eating better is not enough to overcome it. There are no official treatments yet, but you can find some data from the field.
Recent research suggests "that some people with long COVID still had virus fragments lingering in their guts, long after they were no longer testing positive for the virus. Those particles, located through stool samples, might be enough to trigger the release of interferons. That could set off a chain reaction, leading to inflammation that makes it tougher for the digestive system to absorb tryptophan — an essential amino acid found in food that helps the body make serotonin. " [1]
Fucoidan is the best treatment. It handles the issues in the article directly. Mark my words that people will catch on to this more and more in the coming years.
There is a gotcha: quantitative thiamine tests are false negative most of the times. But other blood markers can be revealing: homocysteine, HOMA-IR, blood pH, lactic acid. And it's not always exclusively a thiamine, for some people it's anemia, B3, or B12 deficiencies, or a combination of those.
One should pay attention to the following symptoms: tingling/burning sensations especially in limbs, complexities with swallowing (dysphagia), chronic fatigue, shortness of breath with >= 96% SpO2, uncontrolled muscle cramps, panic attacks, agoraphobia, persistent tinnitus, appearance of dark dots in the field of vision, problems with regulation of body temperature (persistent hypo- or hyperthermia), persistent distortion/loss of smell/taste.
Post-covid is mostly physiological. Sure, it may cause some cognitive and psychological manifestations as well (asthenia, depression, derealization), but without treating the underlying physiology there is no way out.
This video [0] may be a good intro to the topic. There are other resources like [1] who gather and publish related information, including the first-hand experiences of post-Covid sufferers.
Thanks, but I was looking for some actual scientifically recommended treatment programs, with backing research consisting of large enough sample sizes, not yet another YouTube video that cherry picks whatever the author is convinced is the root issue.
If you have underlying conditions which could be worsened by the physical damage from COVID, you should absolutely talk to your doctor.
Just like "freaking out" can cause unnecessary doctor trips, telling people they're seeking unnecessary treatment can cause negative health outcomes. There are many minority communities (most of which have almost no representation on HN, but anyway) have a myriad of different factors preventing them from going to or listening to doctors.
Ultimately you can't control if someone "freaks out" or not. But you can share information that someone might use to protect their health.
Sharing a list of subjective symptoms to “watch out for” so people can “protect their health” isn’t helping anyone.
There’s a difference between telling people to talk to their doctor if they have concerns and posting a list of symptoms which is likely to create concern where none of existed. Most of the mentioned symptoms are highly correlated with stress and anxiety. Listing them and encouraging people to pay attention to them is almost certainly doing more harm than good.
There is also no widely recognized evidence based treatment for any of this. Advising people to seek treatment is likely going to be completely unhelpful, or worse encourage people to go down some quack rabbit hole and start mega dosing vitamins.
Also I’d appreciate if you didn’t imply that cautioning people against posting this kind of medical advice was somehow anti-minority. I can guarantee you that no serious medical professional or minority health advocates are happy to see people posting these symptom lists on forums.
>One should pay attention to the following symptoms: tingling/burning sensations especially in limbs, complexities with swallowing (dysphagia), chronic fatigue, shortness of breath with >= 96% SpO2, uncontrolled muscle cramps, panic attacks, agoraphobia, persistent tinnitus, appearance of dark spots in the field of vision, problems with regulation of body temperature (persistent hypo- or hyperthermia), persistent distortion/loss of smell/taste.
With the exception of loss of smell and taste, these are all also associated with stress physiology. The exact mechanisms are unclear, but lifelong anxiety sufferers will be familiar with many of these. I've personally experienced all of these since I was a young teenager/child. Well before COVID was around.
I don't want to minimize long COVID, because it is very real. But we should be careful about encouraging people with generalized anxiety symptoms to over-identify as long COVID.
Yes, exactly. All of these are physiological symptoms of anxiety.
When the body is in a fight or flight mode and there is no apparent danger, we tend to notice these much more. But overall, they are absolutely and without doubt harmless.
Slow metabolic rate triggers a flight or fight response, just like a panic disorder, so no wonder there is an intersection of symptoms.
But there is a big difference: slow metabolic rate leads to eventual cell death (metabolic encephalopathy), while panic disorder is physiologically harmless in comparison. It's hard to distinguish between the two, and not every doctor is able to do that.
As an interesting observation, a metabolic disorder is not responsive to antidepressants alone.
From what I can see, there does seem to be a strong correlation between how much attention one paid to the government and media, and the subsequent attribution of health issues to having tested positive for an infection at some point.
Among the people I know and that I'm aware of, there are three broad groups (spanning age, sex, and numerous other traits):
1) People who generally ignored the fear that governments, doctors, and the media tried to instill. They disregarded the lockdowns and other measures imposed by government, and remained calm. They didn't take tests, they didn't wear masks, they didn't get any shots, and they generally went about their lives as best that they could as if nothing was happening.
2) People who bought into it, and got somewhat worked up whenever it was pushed by the media. They masked, they stayed indoors when asked to do so, they took tests when they had to, they got shots and maybe boosters, and so on. But once the media focus moved on to other topics, they pretty much forgot about it all and moved on, too.
3) People who became extremely paranoid. Some of them masked month after month, even while at home, which they avoided leaving for weeks at a time. They took daily tests. They've taken every shot and booster available. They lived in a constant state of fear for years. Even after most other people moved on, they didn't, or in some cases, still haven't.
The people I know who fall into the first group are consistently doing well, including those in their 70s, 80s, and even a few in their 90s. None have died, and none have had any major medical problems. I know that some of them don't even know if they ever contracted it, since they never got tested. If they had it, it was indistinguishable from any other cold or flu.
It's a mix for people in the second group, although this is a numerically larger group. Some have had major health complications, including cancer and cardiovascular-related issues, but they generally don't blame their health problems on having tested positive for infection at some point.
The third group are the only ones I hear of attributing ongoing health problems, no matter how minor or common, to a prior infection. Collectively, they now seem to have more serious medical issues, even among those who appeared quite healthy prior to early 2020. Also, I know that a number of these people are repeatedly testing positive for infection, even recently, despite having had numerous shots and boosters, and despite having supposedly overcome one or more prior infections that should have granted some degree of immunity.
I can't say for sure if it's the only factor, but a person displaying more fear/paranoia in the past and present does appear to correlate with more medical problems in the present, and a greater likelihood of attributing such problems to having had prior test-indicated infection(s).
I'm originally from a deeply impoverished rural area where you see a lot of maga flags in yards, etc and I still have a lot of ties to the place. Public health was already in the gutter after the back to back meth and opioid epidemics plus just the general toll that poverty and hard labor takes on your body.
The general mood there was anti mask from the beginning and anti vaccine once that emerged, obviously. And let me tell you, those people got FUCKED UP by covid. No one I know there has any grandparents now! They all died of covid. Several families lost a parent in their 50s to covid, several more to "pneumonia" since like you said they don't even test for it. Another handful are newly bedridden with mysterious illnesses that they're totally sure have nothing to do with covid. I'm not certain that they do either but it's hard to rule it out.
So I don't know man. I don't know who you know. But the people I know who ignored covid get wrecked by it. Every family touched.
Of the people I referred to, many were in Canada (primarily BC, Ontario, Alberta, and Quebec) at the time, but they're from a wide variety of ancestries, nations-of-origin, and socioeconomic statuses. Most of the rest were living primarily in the US, Europe, Australia, and India at the time. A small number were in other Asian nations.
The least-fearful subset tended to be in Ontario and Alberta, the central US, Eastern Europe, and India.
The most-fearful subset were in BC, Quebec, urban Ontario, the coastal and urban areas of the US, and urban Western Europe.
For the grandparents you mention in the cases you're aware of, were they in care homes of some sort?
In Canada, for example, neglect was allegedly a serious problem at some facilities, even leading to significant numbers of deaths there among the elderly:
"Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’"
Please don't push this anti-scientific bullshit here based on your anecdata. Millions of people died from covid; the vast majority weren't all neglected in nursing homes.
I personally knew someone in their 40s who died and two others around the same age who got hospitalised.
I knew several older people who died; I don't know how fearful they were of the disease, but given that it killed them they would have been right to have scared of it.
The mumbo jumbo idea that people were avoiding getting sick through positive thinking is nonsense.
We have to be very cautious with "the actual data" from that time period.
The death counts from Canada's government officials from that era are very questionable, for example.
As early as June of 2020, the "public health" authority in Canada's most-populous city (and the 4th highest population in North America) revealed that the counting of deaths was being done using a methodology that sounds quite dubious:
"Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."
Alberta was also using a dubious death-counting approach, as described in this April 2021 article:
"According to Dr. Deena Hinshaw, any death that has been flagged where COVID-19 is a possible cause is included in the initial count, even if the official cause of death remains unknown."
Quebec's counting of deaths as of May 2022 (and apparently before that) was also dubious:
"Quebec’s interim public health director, Dr. Luc Boileau, has acknowledged that the province has seen a “huge” number of deaths linked to COVID-19. Quebec’s high death toll, he said last Thursday, is explained by the fact the province counts a COVID-19 death as any death involving someone who has the disease.
He said a government study from January indicated that around 30 per cent of the official COVID-19 deaths in the province’s hospitals involved people who tested positive for COVID-19 but whose principle cause of death was not the disease. He said about 40 per cent to 50 per cent of official COVID-19 deaths in the province involve people who had the disease but who died of other causes."
As you can see, "the actual data" from that time period are essentially garbage, which explains why they often don't correspond well to real-world observations.
No, I don't want people to trust my anecdata. I want people to trust the considerable body of peer reviewed science that show the opposite to the drivel the parent poster was spouting.
Yeah, we have plenty of data showing that people who ignored covid and didn't get the vaccine got outcomes far worse than the people who got vaccinated and took things seriously. I'd sooner listen to that than anecdotal evidence, but if people want anecdotal evidence I'm pretty sure they haven't run out of Herman Cain Awards
Unless you know a really unusually large number of people and are rigorously collecting and verifying data about their conditions, I don't know how much value this observation has. It certainly doesn't reflect the experience of the people I know, but I'm not really trying to extrapolate my local experience to the population at large.
Also, given that your categories are basically politely-reworded "Heroes who didn't believe the evil lie that Covid is a serious public health problem that we should probably do some stuff about", "People who believed the evil lies somewhat but eventually learned the Truth" and "Weak paranoid stupid people who bought into all the lies and were consumed by fear and panic as a result", I'm going to go ahead and assume that you're not really coming at this from a perspective of honest inquiry.
There is nothing unscientific about mentioning that covid interacts with and alters metabolism in various ways. This is a hot research topic, in particular because scientists are trying to understand why covid causes fatigue. However I would say that by that definition, virtually all diseases and health problems are “metabolic” in different ways. Which is actually a helpful insight when trying to understand and develop treatments.
Post-covid T2DM is a way of body to compensate for the loss of metabolic rate. A cell uses 3 main substrates to produce energy: glucose, lipids, and oxygen. When metabolic rate is low, the brain subconsciously registers that condition and tries to "increase" the ATP yield by increasing the amount of substrates in the blood. The glucose concentration gets increased by gluconeogenesis, the oxygen gets increased by hyperventilation. In parallel, increased levels of insulin are produced to increase glucose transport function. The aim of the brain is to satisfy the energy demand, and all those compensatory actions are effective to some degree.
However, the cells cannot consume all that glucose despite the massive insulin presence due to a wrecked metabolic machinery of mitochondria, and the body remains hanging in a diabetic, insulin-resistant state of T2DM. If ATP demand is still not met, hyperventilation eventually reaches its peak state, and the individual starts experiencing shortness of breath. If this state of unmet homeostasis lasts for some longer time, the signs of pathological tissue hypoxia start to kick in, causing the appearance of neurological symptoms, which are then followed by metabolic panic attacks (crashes) when left untreated. After that, a more serious cognitive impairment may follow: slurred speech, partial vision loss, problems with spatial navigation, photophobia, etc. All those symptoms correspond to a border-line dementia and may signify the close proximity of a point of no return.
the inflammation seems to be caused by the immune system which makes me wonder if certain things that suppress the immune system can mitigate the damage, almost a catch-22 perhaps
Immunosuppression do help, even its lightest forms such as NSAIDs in small quantities. But immunosuppression alone is not enough to overcome the pathology.
This article feels like it is walking on eggshells of previous controversial topics while also acknowledging the evidence for them.
Also this sentence is just strange to me. The whole point of open science is peer review and truth I thought?
> An initial rush to respond to the pandemic produced a flood of observational and non-randomized studies in this area, he says, which spread more confusion than illumination.
The common "streetlight effect" bias comes to mind:
> A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".
Also widely told in Applied Mathematics departments, with the police replaced by an applied mathematician and the drunk replaced by a pure mathematician.
The worst part IMHO was that most of that stuff was backed up by saying “trust the science” and anyone who criticized it was accused of being “anti-science”.
Come on. The medical community was never "forced" to do anything. A small minority of the medical community voluntarily abused their positions of trust to overstate the strength of scientific evidence and advocate for public health policies that were never justified on an evidence-based medicine basis. Those miscreants sacrificed their own credibility for no benefit, and what's worse is they caused public blowback in other areas.
Please do not spread these unscientific falsehoods here. We are interested in keeping this a space for civil, courteous, and curious discussion.
Whosoever seeks the truth will not proceed by studying the writings of his predecessors and by simply accepting his own good opinion of them. Whosoever studies works of science must, if he wants to find the truth, transform himself into a critic of everything he reads. He must examine tests and explanations with the greatest precision and question them from all angles and aspects.
See the link for the source, a Pfizer press release.
"Authorized or approved mRNA COVID-19 vaccines show increased risks of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the lining outside the heart), particularly within the first week following vaccination."
Lie? What possible benefit would I have to make up stories? I believe in the vaccine and the boosters, I've been vaccinated and boosted myself (though I do need to get another booster), but nothing is problem free. Are you suggesting that there are no possible side effects to the covid booster?
You know there's more than one COVID vaccine, right? Anti-vaxxers generally talk as if they don't know this, and you are talking that way here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_COVID-19_vaccine_autho... - "Ten vaccines have been approved for emergency or full use by at least one stringent regulatory authority recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO): Pfizer–BioNTech, Oxford–AstraZeneca, Sinopharm BIBP, Moderna, Janssen, CoronaVac, Covaxin, Novavax, Convidecia, and Sanofi–GSK.[1] Seven others are under assessment by the WHO: Sputnik V, Sinopharm WIBP, Abdala, Zifivax, Corbevax, COVIran Barekat, and SCB-2019.[2]"
"Of the 40 vaccines, 16 have a full or emergency authorization in only one country, 12 in ten or fewer countries, and 12 in more than ten countries."
You’re calling a scientific article unscientific? I think there’s a difference in not liking the direction or application of science and whether something is science or not.
Edit: Hm, the article is more of a summary/fluff piece. But I still think your argument is more appropriately disagreeing with the direction of science than it is a lack of the application of science.
What makes something scientific are falsifiable statements supported by careful observation and tests in controlled conditions. Not titles. Not affiliation with institutions. Recognition by the press or government is irrelevant to the truth value of research.
I think the whole scientific edifice is or is about to become a bad caricature of the medieval Catholic Church, and is just as in need of a Martin Luther to remind everyone that integrity and a return to principals is long overdue.
This is a somewhat ironic analogy, as Martin Luther was a deranged anti-Semite who called for the mass dispossession and murder of Jews. So, as about as irrational as the church he criticized. Protestant factions subsequently won a Europe-wide war, so he’s not remembered this way in the popular consciousnesses, but this is exactly the kind of person I would expect to decry the “scientific edifice.”
That your only criteria for judging a historical figure is whether or not he's an unconditional supporter of your favorite ethnic group doesn't come off as very objective.
Hey I just wanna say that I'm really glad that you personally haven't had to go through the hell of cardiovascular/heart damage from this, but you also shouldn't use your anecdote to undermine others' extreme sickness. You are ignorant to experiences not your own.
I was quadruple-vaccinated due to being on immunosuppressants, and yet when I finally caught the virus (ironically at a medical science conference) it resulted in a stay at hospital, and now 18 months later I still have rapid heartbeat and heavy breathing after walking up a single flight of stairs, and real trouble concentrating on my work.
For the vast majority of people, yes Covid is on the level of a cold. However for some of us, it's f*** scary. I knew in advance that if I caught it, then it would likely be bad. It's a scary proposition watching the political decisions and individual decisions being made and seeing that the country has basically decided that my life should be written off in favour of a little bit of crowd-pleasing and avoiding mild inconvenience. I have now had 7 vaccines, yet I still have no confidence that I would survive a second infection. That's a level of dread that is unhealthy having hanging over you all the time.
I was teaching at a course a while back, and I saw that the professor in charge of the department running it (who wasn't actually providing any of the teaching and didn't really need to be there) was sniffling all the way through the whole thing, and then a couple of days later I was contacted by an organiser saying that a whole load of people who attended had caught Covid. I could not believe the stupidity from someone who is actually very intelligent. It's an example of very mild inconvenience to just stay at home if you're unwell, because you have no idea if there's someone vulnerable that you're going to infect and potentially kill. I have seen multiple people in the last couple of months visibly unwell, admitting that their other half tested positive for Covid a few days ago, but not believing that they had it themselves and still going out and meeting up with people. That level of wilful ignorance is (in my mind) atrocious in this day and age.
I'm extremely lucky to have a job where I can work from home almost 100% of the time. I can't see this changing in the next couple of years at least. Partly because people believe that "In 2023, COVID is a bad cold/flu".
I'm sorry that you had such a terrible reaction to COVID. Were you wearing a mask at the time you were infected?
I think you need to understand that COVID is never going away. It will always be around and it will always mutate. "In 2023, COVID is a bad cold/flu" is completely true for 99.9% of the entire world, and people like you will need to figure out how to protect yourself, and it's obvious we need to do more research to figure out how to protect people like you.
It's obvious vaccines and masks did nothing to protect you which is really unfortunate because that has been the only strategy they have taken over the last 3 years. This is why I think studying what makes you different from others will help doctors and scientists figure out how to treat it.
But for the vast majority of us, we don't need to keep thinking it's more than a flu and we should figure out how to free ourselves from things like over-quarantining.
> Famously, Covid is different in that it can be spread asymptomatically.
This is another fallacy. All they did was test for the presence of the virus through PCR tests. But that doesn't show anything about infectivity. Every study I could find showed decreasing confidence over the years since 2020 that asymptomatic patients are actually infectious/contagious. Just because they can find the virus on you doesn't mean that you're infectious, those are two different things, and something that actually hasn't been measured properly.
2) Yeah, knowing why some people suffer more than others would be great to know. It probably is like trying to answer why some people get cancer. Genetics, circumstance, age, etc.
> That's ridiculous, especially given the new studies that show that masks didn't prevent spread at all, even according to Fauci.
Those studies are flawed. They make no distinction between N95s, surgical coverings, cloth masks, and fit testing. Those are all huge factors. Properly fitted, high quality respiratory protection is effective.
One big failing on the messaging to the general public is not making these distinctions.
The other problem is that consistency of use matters a lot but is hard to capture in surveys. People say “I always wore a mask” and sometimes that meant “I wore a well-fitted N95 every time I was indoors” and other times it meant “I wore a loose surgical mask when grocery shopping and work but also ate out 5 nights a week”.
This kind of work is like trying to find effective strategies for reducing alcoholism or obesity rates when you know that many people will fill out a questionnaire with the answers shifted out of optimism or shame. Simple random controlled trials are challenging in those situations.
>> Right now it's "Quarantine for at least 5 days and wear a mask for 10 days."
Who says this? My current understanding is do lateral flow tests. When your symptoms are gone and that is negative you're not very contagious anymore. Typically 3-7 days are the onset of symptoms in my experience.
Age is the main factor affecting outcome. The risk of death in the 70+ cohort was quite high before vaccination, but the risk in the 50+ population was also unacceptably high. Vaccines basically had the effect of shifting the curve to the right by 15-20 years, i.e. 70 years old vaccinated has the same risk as 50 years old unvaccinated.
After age, yeah, genetics, use of ACE inhibitors, coagulopathy, etc., account for a lot of the remaining risk of death.
What is fear-mongering? And what is this need to stop fear-mongering about? I'm suspicious of it, because it seems to often lead to suppression of truth.
1. I haven't seen any credible studies prove the total ineffectiveness of masks. Don't forget two things: preventing spread is never a binary issue, it is and always has been about slowing it down enough to give health services a break. Only a handful of countries made it their ambition to totally stop the spread, and even then its a matter of slowing it enough so it dies out rather than spreads. Masks are not hazmat suits.
2. There's a small percentage that reacts really bad, but it was large enough to bring health services to its knees and cause tens of millions of deaths globally. Then there is a much larger percentage that got it quite bad, people that didn't need to be hospitalized but were totally handicapped for months and months (or years).
Your last remark hints at a conspiracy, and with that you are the one who is fear mongering.
> The real problem is that scientists aren't studying the thing that really matter now for 99% of the population, which is:
> 1) When is someone with COVID no longer contagious so they can return back to school/work?
From September 2023 paper linked below:
...numbers of exhaled SARS-CoV-2 RNA copies during COVID-19 infection do not decrease significantly until day 8 from symptom-onset. COVID-19-positive participants exhaled an average of 80 SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA copies per minute during the first 8 days of infection, with significant variability both between and within individuals, including spikes over 800 copies a minute in some patients. After day 8, there was a steep drop to levels nearing the limit of detection, persisting for up to 20 days.
Should catching COVID in a 20 seconds elevator ride concern anyone?
Our findings can be used to demonstrate future feasibility of estimating the amount of time it takes for an individual to exhale an infectious dose of SARS-CoV-2: For example, assuming a conservative estimate of infectious dose for COVID-19 of 300 virions (35, 36), a person exhaling 900 viral RNA copies per minute (as did peak shedders in our study) could be conservatively estimated to exhale an infectious dose in around 20 seconds (not safe for an elevator ride), whereas a person who is exhaling 10 viral copies per minute could be estimated to exhale an infectious dose in over 30 minutes (probably ok for an elevator ride) (37). Along these same lines, once the relationship between exhaled viral RNA and replication-competent virus is established, if combined with rapid SARS-CoV-2 detection methods, our device could be used to assist in development of an at-home infectiousness test.
Of course, it depends.
So the key takeaway is that a device that would help with your first question seems possible.
"If infected lungs are incapable of effectively exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide, then stressed hearts might suffer damage due to insufficient oxygen."
"Among the more common lingering problems — affecting up to one-third of all patients with long COVID — is postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), which causes the heart to beat abnormally fast. [...] in people with POTS, the blood vessels may not constrict appropriately. Instead, the heart rate must rise even more than normal to compensate for the “lazy” blood vessels, says Lee Lewis. Conversely, the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in when the body rests, instructing blood vessels to dilate and instructing the heart to beat more slowly so the blood pressure goes down."
"Similar to POTS, if patients remain sedentary for too long, Anagnostopoulos says, they could develop cardiac atrophy; decreased stroke volume, meaning that the heart doesn’t pump enough blood out of the left ventricle during contraction; or compensatory tachycardia, characterized by resting heart rates that exceed 100 beats per minute."
A blood thinner or anti-inflammatory isn't going to treat the POTS or sedentary effects, and deprivation of oxygen is going to do longer-term damage to the heart. If you did use an anti-inflammatory, you'd have to use it at a low dose for a long period of time (months), but that's still not addressing the other issues.
Yes, the heart really has no capacity for repair. It just simply scars over. That's why things like "transient myocarditis" are scary. The inflammation may be transient, but the damage is long lasting.
> The human heart has only limited self-healing powers and a limited regenerative capacity. A damaged heart muscle and the resulting loss of function can usually not be fully restored. The reason for this is that heart muscle cells in the adult organism have largely lost their ability to divide.
One description that always resonated with me is the tradeoff between capacity for repair and uncontrolled repair or cancer.
Think of two extremes: 1) no capacity for repair: once something is damaged, the cells don't divide and you lost functionality. But there can be no run-away growth or cancer. 2) infinite capacity for repair: damage cells can always be repaired but a bad instruction can cause run away division and growth and become cancerous.
So evolution has to figure out where to turn that knob. Do you want to allow repair at a risk of cancer?
Generally things that didn't get "injured" evolved to reduce repair capacity. Rarely (ever?) do you hear of heart or eye cancer. Those cells just don't have much repair capacity. But think of skin. That's always getting damaged, so it makes sense for there to be more capacity of repair there at the cost of more cancer.
It's all tradeoffs. And it can change over (generational) time. Consider a warring population, if people are getting killed younger before they have the time to get cancer, then that population will end up with more capacity for repair because it makes more sense for survival to repair because cancer never gets involved.
And the converse can happen, when long life becomes the norm then the tradeoff change and cancer prevention is more beneficial than total repair capacity.
Just painting with broad strokes here, it's not exact, but a trend that does show up between populations.
Instead of hinting at it, they should support the forbidden topic with credible evidence. And if the vast majority of credible evidence contradicts the forbidden topic, then maybe it's not forbidden, it's just incorrect and people are tired of seeing it.
I’m not clear what people would be posting about that’s not extremely contrived.
This is an article about how bad Covid is for the heart. Are you saying people are still making the anti-vax flawed neophobic claim that vaccines are worse than Covid. If that’s the case, I feel sad for those people suffering from their phobias.
Egads! Conspiracy theorists really like to make their views known at any chance, as if it’s a lack of awareness that is why people dismiss them. “This time I know it, this time when people hear the earth is flat and the moon landing was faked they’ll all start believing!! I know it”
Yes this is a dismissive way to reply but at some point there is no point in addressing theses theories on merit, providing evidence or reason to flat earthers and the like doesn’t persuade them and it instead it emboldens them somehow while they eagerly provide reams of willfully misinterpreted “facts”
At least you recognise that nothing you said was substantive..
Do you really think its impossible to conceive of the idea that pharmaceutical companies would orchestrate a global event with political institutions when they stand to benefit into perpetuity? Fine.
I’ve read plenty of controversial posts here. If it’s written by someone with actual expertise in the field and fact-based it’ll do fine. The stuff which gets flagged tends to be written by political pundits pretending to be medical experts, making huge extrapolations from limited evidence, or failing to make testable claims which can be evaluated scientifically.
Since you didn’t provide any examples, I don’t know what you’re referring to but never saw anything characterizable as propaganda in favor of vaccination.
It's better than it used to be. A few years ago I do recall posting official sources and still getting heavily downvoted/flagged, not so much recently with the same type of comments.
From April 2020, far before any covid vaccine came out:
> An article entitled “Impact of complicated myocardial injury on the clinical outcome of severe or critically ill COVID-19 patients” in CJC by Professor Hesong Zeng and colleagues from Tongji Hospital Affiliated to Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, reported on the impact of evidence of myocardial injury among patients with COVID-19.
> Among patients with myocardial injury, hospital mortality was more than three times higher than the normal serum cardiac troponin level.
Moreover, the levels of C-reactive protein, average 153.6 ng/L vs. 49.8 ng/L, and N-terminal pro-B-type natriuretic peptide, 852.0 ng/L vs. 197.0 ng/L, were significantly higher in patients with myocardial injury.
> It appears that prevalence of myocardial injury is high among severe or critically ill COVID-19 patients, who face a significantly higher risk of in-hospital mortality.
> Furthermore, the study suggests that it is important to monitor and manage myocardial injury during hospitalization for severe or critically ill COVID-19 patients.
> The chest computed tomography (CT) features of patients with heart failure are similar to those with COVID-19.
> Therefore, it is a great challenge to make a clear diagnosis early during the global pandemic, as pointed out by Professor Shenghua Zhou and colleagues from Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University in their article entitled “Comparison of heart failure and COVID-2019 in chest CT features and clinical characteristics.”
> For imaging features, both groups had ground-glass opacity and thickening of interlobular septa, but the ratio of central and gradient distribution was higher in patients with heart failure than that in patients with COVID-19 (4/7 vs. 1/12).
> It seems enlargement of pulmonary veins, lesion distribution, and morphology are highly important clinical findings to identify the chest CT features between heart failure and COVID-19.
Additional research on the prognosis, evaluation, and management of cardiovascular diseases and cardiovascular complications in COVID-19 patients is essential.
I will just directly say what you are alluding to and take the hit of downvotes. Many studies have now found the vaccinations cause myocardial injury such as this one that found 1 in 35 people receiving the vaccination showed markers of myocardial damage. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ejhf.2978
These articles seem to be trying to point the cause of the damage to the Covid disease when the evidence unmentioned shows that the damage is coming from the vaccinations.
Studies show that Covid causes worse myocardial injury at a greater rate independent of the vaccine, which makes logical sense since the vaccine just produces a small part of Covid. It's better to get a vaccine with a small chance of heart damage than a disease with a large chance.
But...the vaccinated can still get Covid just the same. So, it's not a "have one OR have the other" situation. When you take the vaccine, it's a "have one PLUS have the other" situation.
Vaccinated people do not have the same chances or severity of Covid. It greatly reduces your chances of having any symptoms at all, let alone severe illness.
I went to cardiologists for a mild burning sensation in my chest area, post recovery of my first & only covid infection, in early 2022. They dismissed my concerns. A year after recovery, I resumed my routine strenuous exercises, and I noticed I had elevated resting and walking heart-rate and my apple watch would alert me of abnormal heart rates. I went to cardiologists again and they dismissed my concerns again. Both times, they did all the usual battery of tests (Echo, TMT/EKG, cholesterol, blood markers etc) and they all came "normal". They basically told me stop googling things and to throw away my smart watch. Anyway, another thing my watch was telling was that I wasn't getting enough sleep and I focused on fixing that. A few months after that, my resting heart rate started to trend down and has come back to pre-covid levels. I don't know what to make of it all. One expensive doctor explained it to me this way – historically medical community don't have enough data about how post-infection recovery has been in large populations w.r.t heart rates. Only recently, with smart watches etc such data is available. Until that smart wearable data is scientifically studied, analyzed and concluded, the doctors won't change their diagnostics and treatment protocols, for good reason. While I understand that, I felt that their current protocols are for suited for well-advanced and well-presenting cardiac diseases that occur in old people.
In my experience (in my non-US country) doctors don't make much use of heart rate for diagnosis at all.
We check things with a pulse oximeter when feeling unwell and quite often we see elevated heart basal rates associated with infections, uncorrelated with body temperature. These tends to correlate quite fell with feelings of tiredness/uncomfort. I found it interesting that doctors most of the times feel entirely uninterested with this.
>One expensive doctor explained it to me this way – historically medical community don't have enough data about how post-infection recovery has been in large populations w.r.t heart rates. Only recently, with smart watches etc such data is available.
This is absolutely true and one part of the root problem. The other aspect of this is that most of the heart tracking devices we use live on the wrist and the data is of questionable quality and application. Many cardiologists know this and dismiss the devices and its uses wholesale, but that approach is wrong. The data isnt 'wholesale bad' its just bad at many things (hilariously, particularly bad at the things they advertise on the most). One of the things its GOOD at doing is noting when your heart is behaving differently from your baselines, which is why its generally pretty good at noting AFIB or pre-AFIB characteristics, for example.
This level of complexity on the issue, coupled with the relative lack of understanding with post-infection behavior/detailed immunoresponse, is definitely leading to some less than ideal approaches to patient care. and obviously the nature of COVID, being the first generally uniform viral infection of the entire population since 1918, being a huge wrench.
source: I am not a doctor in any way, my dad has a 30 year history of complex heart problems and i get to speak with his specialists a lot. like, 12 of them by this point. I work in tech and play with many types of health tracker devices regularly so it comes up in conversation.
historically medical community don't have enough data about how post-infection recovery has been in large populations w.r.t heart rates
I'd agree here. Most doctors have not really caught up to the giant data science revolution we have going on. A couple years ago I bought one of these [1] while trying to diagnose some general health/fatigue issues and after a year of data logging and life experiences it was pretty cool to watch how my HR/O2 numbers changed in response to various events - long bike rides, strength training, getting a cold, being on antibiotics, etc. The nice thing about this device was 1) it's much more accurate than smart watches and 2) provides raw time-series data vs some abstract fancy marketing UI.
At this point I now do comprehensive bloodwork panels at least quarterly and while I don't use the O2 device anymore I still have the baseline data saved. I'd recommend to anyone to start recording this type of data while you subjectively "feel good". It'll make it much easier to diagnose + press doctors on health issues if you can point to data associated with a time you felt well.
Big data work on healthcare is stymied not only by inconsistent collection, but also healthcare privacy laws and a lack of standardization across the industry. So many medical device manufacturers are holed up in their little silos and have no interest in contributing to the general knowledge. They are in it to make money, not to advance the science.
Healthcare privacy laws are not a hindrance in the US. Basically all one needs is a business agreement with a HIPAA-compliant entity and one can send PHI data. And certainly so if the patient opts in.
So I would say it is 100% due to the siloing and proprietary enshittification endemic to the industry. They don't want to help science, they want vendor lock-in.
> I'd agree here. Most doctors have not really caught up to the giant data science revolution we have going on.
Well, compared to psychology researchers, the medical researchers are doing pretty well on data science. I‘m not joking. In psychology, data science just doesn’t exist yet. P-values still rule the day and overfitting is a term they have never heard of.
I had a very similar experience. I did measure my heart rate previously though, and the high resting heart rate notifications were new.
I was very worried at first because one of my personally prioritized indicators of fitness was how quickly I could go from say, zone 3 to 50bpm. This was quite low, then suddenly I was having 70-90bpm around 30m after exercising.
Yet it gradually went away and I never actually experienced discomfort or anything like it. I haven’t seen a high restating rate in around 6 months. I’d say it lasted around a year, in total.
I can see why this condition could kill people with pre-existing heart issues or generally poor cardiovascular health. Having your heart working nearly double time at rest is a huge task when you’re already struggling. It was a great eye opener; I really don’t want to have this again and have it be the final straw that causes a heart attack.
I went to a cardiologist in 2021 and told them I am concerned that I have lingering health issues due to a covid infection months earlier prior to vaccines being available to the public. Heart pain, unexpected palpitations, racing heart rate, etc. Was previously training for a marathon.
That cardiologist told me that covid has no effect on the cardiovascular system and the heart cannot feel pain and discharged me to a PCP after running a handful of tests to rule out anything (Echo, EKG, labs, etc)
Now here we are in 2023, I have had long covid for almost 3 years and cardiologists are now admitting they are wrong. This article is pretty telling on the dismissive behavior and the truth catching up to them.
Not a surprise - almost everything initially said about covid was wrong; maybe next time people saying things should be so absolutely definitive about things they clear don't know enough about (yet). I would rather doctors hedged their advice/proclamations a bit, then to be definitive when they shouldn't be.
agreed - but not only did they know they didn't have all the information - so they were in effect making a guess based on the limited information they had - but they also took the extra step of discrediting anyone that held a different opinion.
To be fair, this is something built into the average humanity. If we have learned something from young, it takes very much to change this belief. It can be anything from what is the best programming language to politics, religion or whatever. For discussions with the opposite belief, it easily goes into - "He has been brainwashed" - land. It's very hard to convince someone that they have been wrong their whole life, especially if there has been loads of studies supporting that case.
> Now here we are in 2023, I have had long covid for almost 3 years and cardiologists are now admitting they are wrong. This article is pretty telling on the dismissive behavior and the truth catching up to them.
I think this is being too demanding of doctors. Their opinion changed because the science changed. Discovery and understanding simply takes time. Practicing doctors aren't scientists, they aren't charged with the responsibility for discovering new disorders and treating them correctly on a per-patient basis. Their job is simply to understand the best available consensus about disorders and treat their patients accordingly. And... it sounds like your doctor did exactly that.
And it surely sucks terribly that the understanding was wrong. But that's not really the fault of your doctor. No one could have treated you better at the time except via dumb luck. It's OK to accuse them of being an asshole about it, but not really about being "wrong" so much.
If being taken seriously is too demanding, then I will continue to do so.
My story I hope shows this exact sentiment mentioned in this article:
> “It’s important to acknowledge that these patients are suffering,” Anagnostopoulos says. “Many of them are young and unaccustomed to being sick or held back in any way from what they want to do. They often feel they haven’t been taken seriously. And what they want to know is that the doctor sitting with them is developing a plan for improvement.”
I think I agree with you there. But being unsympathetic and being wrong are two different states, and it's important to distinguish the two. The doctor did the "right" thing according to the understanding of the time, they were just a jerk about it. And that's being a bad doctor, but it's not delivering "incorrect" treatment.
It's basically a converse take to the "You're not wrong, you're just an asshole" meme.
Cardiologists aren't exactly known for their bedside-manner. Also I did present these reputable journals this article alluded to:
> As the COVID-19 pandemic was getting underway in early 2020, doctors in Wuhan, China, began to report that many patients hospitalized with the disease had cardiac injuries. Heart attacks were frequent, especially in patients with underlying risk factors, and there were numerous cases of myocarditis, which occurs when the heart’s muscle layers become inflamed. Roughly a quarter of patients with severe COVID-19 had elevated blood levels of troponin, a protein marker for cardiac damage.
Still was dismissive of covid having any effect on cardiovascular. But you can only learn so much in 60 minutes over 3 months right?
Again, that's misstating the science. No one could "learn" about cardiovascular effects of covid in 2021 because there was simply no consensus understanding.
"Doctors report many patients [...]" framing is true of all sorts of nonsense, all the time (including about covid! Hydroxychloroquine was being boosted by the same kind of anecdotal evidence). That's... just not how medicine works. How do you know which anecdotes are nonsense and which are correct? You do the science. And they did. But not in time for a lot of people, and yes, that's awful.
I can understand their skepticism, but these professionals should always be open to new data and should at the very least make a note of it in your records so the retrospective analyses can be done. Do you know if any of your symptoms got recorded?
American doctors are trained to dogmatically accept medical treatments uncritically. The dogma is called the "standard of care" and the entire medical, billing, and legal system will work against you if you deviate from it. They will only change their ways when they are told to do so from higher up.
"Airplane mechanic decides service manual incorrect, custom fix leads to 200 dead"
And yes, what you state is exactly what the doctor should do. Otherwise you're taking all the testing and experience of all the other doctors that have already worked on this issue and tossed it out the window. When an individual patient shows anonymous behavior your document everything you can for future investigation. You don't get to play research laboratory on your patients.
Now, if we had an unlimited number of doctors this wouldn't be near the problem (why we have a limited number of doctors is a different question). If a huge portion of the US population wasn't old relative to the part of the population that is young, this wouldn't be near the problem. If a massive portion of the US population wasn't... um... massive, well then this wouldn't as much of a problem.
But the country we are left with has too few doctors, too many old people, and too many unhealthy people. We can argue until we're blue on why that is the case, but that does nothing to change that your doctor has about 5 minutes with you and an entire waiting room full of patients today, tomorrow, and the everyday after that to the point they are turning patients away in most places.
Custom solutions aren't the enemy, but in situations where an applicable evidence-based medicine protocol exists it would be malpractice to deviate from that without a damn good reason. Those treatment protocols produce good results for average patients (i.e. most of us).
Nonsense. That is not how American doctors are trained. Have your ever actually talked to a medical school professor, or an attending physician in a teaching hospital?
In recent years the medical profession has been shifting from being mostly an art to mostly a science. Clinicians are supposed to follow evidence-based medicine protocols rather than making things up as they go along because those produce better outcomes on average. They should only deviate from those protocols if the patient has some sort of contraindication, experiences serious side effects, or fails to respond. Unfortunately we still lack clear protocols for many conditions including post-viral syndrome.
Yes, there are several doctors in my family. They are great at treating acute problems and absolutely clueless about managing chronic health conditions unless there is a drug for it.
The majority of chronic health conditions are the result of lifestyle choices. Those are largely outside the scope of medicine, and it is unreasonable to expect solutions from doctors. They have some drugs that can ameliorate symptoms in severe cases but those mostly don't address root causes. Patients might get better results from a personal trainer, dietician, therapist, or social worker.
The doctor says "Yep, Covid fucked you over"... What changes?
That doctor is not handing you out a candy bag of medicine to see what fixes your issues. Your "was training" is still going to be that "was". Now after some large number of people like you start showing up for the same issue, then some smaller portion of them get direct diagnosis (either post death, or during some other surgery), the doctors won't know what to do as a means of treatment. It's likely it will be years longer till we have effective means of treating long covid symptoms.
I suspect GP would find the subjective difference between "go home, it's all in your head" and "you aren't crazy, but I don't know how to help you" to be meaningful.
4. Other patients who are young and healthy are also validated (i.e. we are seeing more of you)
5. etc
The problem with western medicine today is that if you cannot be treated, they want you out of the system. The system is starting to get much better at adapting to these novel health challenges though. I suppose that will happen when there's 65 million across the world with these issues!
The system is already overloaded by an aging population and a shortage of practitioners. There is no capacity to schedule extra office visits for the sake of making patients feel that they are validated and being taken seriously. That may seem cruel, but that is our reality. It's only going to get worse as the demographic situation continues to deteriorate.
There's absolutely a shortage, but what about recent innovations or acceptance of things like e-visits, 24/7 clinics, and even AI-assistance for clerical work taking more load off of practitioners?
For example, I'm looking at my HCP's app right now and can schedule a call with my doctors as early as next week for an e-visit. For an in-person visit, it's closer to a month. But they have absolutely been taking my extra office visits due to my condition.
Telehealth visits and expanded clinic hours make obtaining certain types of care more convenient for patients. They do nothing to address practitioner productivity and workload. It's still one practitioner working directly with one patient.
AI might eventually reduce charting workload slightly. A few vendors have launched new products in that space but they haven't had much impact yet. In the ideal case they might allow for an average doctor to squeeze in a couple more short encounters per day.
It would unlock insurance money for treating the root cause.
Long COVID's effects are so random and personalized that many people have to throw the kitchen sink at it until they find a solution that works for them.
What insurance money is being locked? If a patient has severe symptoms then insurers will pay claims that meet medical necessity criteria for symptomatic treatment regardless of whether the patient has been formally diagnosed with "long COVID" or whatever.
now that COVID has a few years to run we have new data for scientist to discover it's effect.
back then no one knew anything about COVID. it's not like the doctor was hiding the truth. people are expecting them to be all-knowing is just being unrealistic. did you expect him to just pull out a magical pill from his back pocket to fix everything.
DISCLAIMER: this is my opinion, obviously I am not saying "this is what is definitely happening". I assumed that was a given but the world is full of surprises.
> I wasn't getting enough sleep and I focused on fixing that. A few months after that, my resting heart rate started to trend down and has come back to pre-covid levels. I don't know what to make of it all
Of course you know what to make of it all. You were obsessing over the metrics available to you, as many have done as well (myself included), and increased your overall stress levels, bumping your heart rate and making it erratic, and messing up your sleep, which only served to compound it all. You took a year off from strenuous exercise you said, of course it takes time to get your resting rate back down to levels before you were sick and when actively exercising. Imo there is no mystery here. Focusing on your sleep calmed your mind and your body followed suite, combined with the exercise having time to improve circulation and make you more tired to give you better sleep, which helps to lower your overall stress levels, which lowers heart rate, etc, etc.
The true question is, did the heart rate elevation cause you any physical issues, or was the issue only that you had visibility into the number. Or put another way, had it not been for 24/7 readings of your heart rate, and notifications from your watch, would it ever have manifested itself physically and been something you felt, and noticed. Based on everything starting out with "my watch would alert me" or similar, I'm gonna say if you're honest with yourself, had you not had a watch the issue might have come and gone and never been noticed.
Edit: here come the downvotes for the crime of claiming some things can be self inflicted esp when it comes to fitbit/apple watches. I've watched countless friends and family members fall victim to the obsession of metrics, freaking out about their heart rates all the time, etc. I used to do it myself. It's not a bad thing, but it is a thing, and people need to acknowledge it.
There's a difference between claiming "some things can be self-inflicted" vs "your thing I'm diagnosing from your description is definitely self-inflicted".
You must have missed the "Imo there is no mystery here" smack dab in the middle of my comment, but I added a big disclaimer at the top just now to be sure
One man’s direct is another man’s aggressive. I can’t help how you interpret what I wrote, and I’m not one to sound overly cheerful because it’s not accurate to how I feel about the topic. I’m also not aggressive about it. I’m indifferent, and what I wrote is if nothing else just an alternative vantage point for the parent commenter to use when making an informed decision. Placebos exist, as do physical manifestations of stress from over thinking things. Heart rate monitors are pretty well known for triggering that in people, and like I said, it did that to me when I first got one.
Was it a shallow pain, like almost in the surface or lining of the chest wall? Might have been something called costochondritis.
I had had it off and on since the 1990s, usually for a day or two. But, after each Covid infection I had it for several days, the worst lasting a couple of weeks. Burning sensation in the breast plate, physically hot to the the touch where the ribs connected to the sternum.
Even if we don't have enough data for a causal link, from the information you've provided, it sounds like the elevated heart rates were more correlated with your poor sleep schedule than with your COVID infection.
Also consider that taking on strenuous exercise when you haven't done it in a while is going to cause elevated heart rates, beyond what your previous normal heart rate was during that exercise. Regular exercise will also eventually lower your resting heart rate. I think "starting a new strenuous exercise regimen" (because yes, after a year's break, that counts as "new") would also be unsurprisingly linked to elevated heart rates, even resting.
Certainly the burning sensation in your chest area is concerning, but did you rule out the more simple and common cause: acid reflux?
I agree that it's unfortunate that there hasn't been enough research on consumer health monitoring data, but I don't think your story says much about the cardiologists' diagnostic process. But I also expect that, with the general lack of understanding of the long-term effects of COVID, many doctors are not equipped to diagnose lingering health issues stemming from an infection.
> Also consider that taking on strenuous exercise when you haven't done it in a while is going to cause elevated heart rates, beyond what your previous normal heart rate was during that exercise. Regular exercise will also eventually lower your resting heart rate. I think "starting a new strenuous exercise regimen" (because yes, after a year's break, that counts as "new") would also be unsurprisingly linked to elevated heart rates, even resting.
Yes, that was my first thought too while reading the comment. A lower heartrate during exercise and resting is a strong fitness indicator. And pausing your exercises for a year significantly reduces your fitness. Of course you will see elevated heart rates.
I've lost a lot of faith in medical professionals recently to the point I almost don't want to waste time with them unless I really have to. I was having issues with severe pain and tension in all of my movements. My doctor shrugged it off twice, the third time my wife came and she read him the riot act for not taking me seriously. I did a blood test same day and my rheumatoid factors were so off the charts(doctors words) he was surprised I wasn't more vocal. Dude, I came to see you two times before, I need to cause a scene in your office to get real care?
Then my wife went for hip surgery. We were told it was routine, everything is going to be great, less pain, better range of motion. My wife came out of the ER with the inability to move her leg, drop foot, nerve damage. She went in able and came out disabled. 3 big surgeries later, she can walk again. UCSF doesn't want to hear us out on anything related to that botched surgery and the surgeon has since moved to New York.
Dealing with medical professionals is like dealing with toddlers. You have to push them on everything or they simply do not care.
They're being squeezed by patient demand and administrations simultaneously, the whole system in the US has seemed on the brink of collapse since 2020.
I get all my care done in Taiwan and everything is fine and the doctors all seem to be mostly happy with their jobs, and a few regular nurses like me because I look like a famous actor, so they're always pretty chatty and seem to be mostly ok with life.
Would you care to share more on how you do this? Do you just fly out and pay out of pocket? How do you find specialists? Curious about this for my mother.
I have permanent residency in Taiwan so it's easy for me, although before that it was still easier than anything in the US, just not next to free without their national insurance.
I don't necessarily encourage medical tourism but simply fly to Taipei, find a doctor you want to see, and sign up for an appointment. It will be a little more work without the NHI card but still probably less than whatever you're dealing with. If you get medical scans, almost everyone can print a CD with them in a day or two if you ask. Getting care even without insurance was cheaper than just my US insurance premiums.
Having someone fluent in Chinese is important enough I'd say it was required but if you restrict yourself to a smaller sunset of hospitals and clinics that serve foreigners around like Tianmu you may be able to get by with a translator app.
People outside NHI are uncommon and their medical system isn't really set up to support it. You may want to consider actual medical tourism facilities of which I've heard of several in Mexico or Costa Rica.
You and your mother may also want to consider rioting, because the US system is deliberately and almost uniquely stupid.
Check out Thailand. Medical tourism is a thing. Generally, yes... pay out of pocket, but it is so inexpensive compared with insurance that it isn't a big deal.
Also, people don't realize, you can get health insurance in other countries. Prior to covid, I was an expat living in Vietnam and had very good full health coverage for about $4500 a year. I just found a local insurance broker who did all the paperwork for me.
The US medical system is such a mess. I go to get blood drawn regularly and even with an appointment sometimes the wait is over 90 minutes. There will be people who had an appointment but they were five minutes late so they got put on the walk-in waitlist, which often never gets processed so they sit for hours only to get dismissed. Everything costs too much money and the service is awful. It’s just a nightmare.
Unless doctors can see with their naked eye what's wrong they just give you the boot unless you fight hard, diagnose yourself with google, and demand tests. I used to think doctors got mad at googlers because they would find crazy wrong answers and waste their time. Now I know it is because it reveals their incompetence. I laugh whenever anyone says the US has the "best medical system in the world".
The quality of a medical system can only be reliably assessed through population level outcomes, not individual anecdotes. In some specific metrics such as cancer 5-year survival rates, the USA is consistently at or near the best in the world. In other metrics such as maternal and infant mortality we're way behind. It's inconsistent and patient experiences will vary widely based on medical condition and location.
While medical expenses can push you to bankruptcy, more often it's the loss of earning potential that does it with severe illness (whether directly or because of need to care for family member).
That is, our general health cost picture and way insurance works is a subject of concern, but the bigger issue for this specific talking point is just general lack of safety net.
I had to tell a lung specialist that my shortness of breath, which was being alleviated by antihistamines, might be allergy-related. She literally told me my symptoms were "a mystery" after I had told her that antihistamines were helping.
My optometrist said it was machine’s measurement error when I used used myopia curing methods to bring my eye diopters down exactly 0.75 right & 0.5 left and it exactly happened.
I'm not sure what you do, but lets say you're a programmer. You love programming and want to make the world better with it. Of course you also have $400,000 in education debt from becoming a programmer and need a job to ensure you don't end up bankrupt. So you get a job for $bigCorp that pays well. BigCorp tells you that you must push out 100,000 lines of code per day or you're out. You look around and all the jobs in what you do pretty much act the same way, and those bills are coming up at the end of the month. Now, you know you cannot turn out quality code at that rate so you cut back quality to a bare minimum to meet the metrics of continued employment.
Most doctors are in a similar situation these days, very few independent offices exist. They are parts of "GiantHealthCareCorpofAmerica,INC" that cares far more about how much the shareholders are going to make than how the patents are, even though each individual doctors would like to give better individual patient care.
His point was that Dr. behavior is a symptom of US dysfunction.
Take away medical debt, triple the number of doctors, reduce pay to reduce selection pressure on $ chasers, etc. and you will start addressing causes of the symptoms.
That's not the impression I've developed, having been a software engineer for about 15 years. I think I spent about $100k total, and got a bachelor's and a master's degree without any subsidies. 400K in student loans for a computer science engineering degree seems pretty steep. That would have to be out-of-state tuition at a pretty nice school. (I suppose we've been in a decade of low interest rates, so perhaps folk have been more willing to borrow a lot more?) I've worked at a BigCorp, and never had lines of code as a performance metric. Lately at my current job, I practically write no lines of code per day, and instead spend most of my time designing solutions to problems and mentoring others.
>400K in student loans for a computer science engineering degree seems pretty steep
I did a little adjustment to the numbers in the sense I put them closer to the numbers actual doctors pay for their schooling, not exactly programmer pay. On average doctors pay and programmers pay is very similar. Doctors schooling and programmers schooling is nothing alike at all. Moreso, it's far easier to get blacklisted as a doctor then a programmer for any number of reasons (programmer ethics, lol funny). Where you have more risks, more regulations, and more costs the more likely the default behavior becomes to toe the line.
My appendix exploded while inside of me bc the doctors dismissed my severe abdominal pain as "bad diet". I then had severe infection and had an agonising week in hospital. This was when I was about 16, so more than a decade ago, it was the NHS in the UK.
I have a lot of good friends who took the path to be a physician when i opted back into tech. It's been staggering to see 100% of them say never go into medicine, at least in the US. Two are considering leaving the country to practice when their loans are paid off.
My personal side project is finding and documenting ways to get treatment while avoiding the insurance system as much as possible. IMO you really should only see a GP in the sick-care system as someone to order the most basic labs and screenings, and to receive reports you seek out on your own from specialists who take cash payments.
You can download the US Preventative Services App, punch in your data, and see the recommended screeners for your situation.
> Dealing with medical professionals is like dealing with toddlers. You have to push them on everything or they simply do not care.
I noticed a similar problem in other fields. The other day I spent an additional, unnecessary hour at the dealership, because the guy who was supposed to notify me that the car is ready... vanished. He had three other clipboards from other customers on his desk when I arrived to ask about the status.
My mortgage application process was, simply put, a dumpster fire - my form sat idle for a month until someone finally looked at it.
I feel as if all the accumulated karma from all my botched ticket estimates is finally coming back.
Wikipedia search recommended! It comes from a UK law called the Riot Act granting officials the power to forcefully disperse gatherings if they refuse to disperse after a verbally delivered warning - the precise wording of which was specified by the Act. So an official would literally read the Riot Act to a troublesome group, and if they kept it up, the lads with truncheons would come and start cracking heads.
The idiomatic transfer is fairly obvious, although the implication of consequences if the admonished party is insufficiently contrite has become sort of optional, I think.
I'll just augment this by saying: you have to push them, but learn to push properly. This means not being aggressive (yelling), or dismissive (even if you know medical research as well as the doctor), being patient, repetitive, and sometimes even play dumb.
> elevated resting and walking heart-rate and my apple watch
Glad you recovered. If you have an Apple watch be sure to also track your overnight HRV. (I have a Garmin). While many blood tests fail to be illuminating, RHR and HRV at least can indicate something is wrong. A high HRV/Low RHR is good, Low HRV/High HR is bad. And yeah, cardiologists are the worst when it comes to unexplained heart issues that are not picked up by an ECHO.
> Anyway, another thing my watch was telling was that I wasn't getting enough sleep and I focused on fixing that. A few months after that, my resting heart rate started to trend down and has come back to pre-covid levels.
There’s solid research causally linking lack of sleep to high blood pressure the next day.
Not the person you're replying to, but I am someone who actively is trying to get more sleep due to problems with high blood pressure.
Good sleep comes with good habits.
No liquid consumption near bedtime.
Caffeine intake reduction and cutoff at least 6 hours before bedtime.
Having a wind down routine instead of waiting on my body to tell me to sleep. (Use phone in bed instead of a computer mainly)
I was averaging less than 6 hours of sleep a night. Nodding off at work was common, and I would compensate with caffeine.
I still don't feel energetic, but I'm less tired now, and looking to increase my nightly sleep to 7.5 hours. It just sucks sometimes to get home at 7 PM and try to sleep at 10 PM.
Alcohol has a huge negative impact on sleep quality, especially when consumed late in the day. If you have a smart watch with sleep tracking then you'll probably notice a very obvious impact from even two drinks at dinner.
I mean. A year between strenuous exercise is a lot. It only takes several days without strenuous exercise before the body begins realigning and fitness is lost.
Interestingly, I have an irregular heartbeat just normally, and have inner ear problems that cause my heart rate to change for doing nothing at all, and my watch has never made any warning about it.
A doctor tried to subscripe 'medication' which came from a company in the same city and had one study regarding inflamation reduction. One! The researcher is dead, the amount in the pill is 100x less than what he tried in the research paper. The pills would have been 100$ for a month.
The other doctor has a magnetic resonanz device (doesn't work...) and suggested to me homeopathy with the sentence 'i know people say it doesn't work but it works for my patients' (come on srsly? textbook stupidity...)
Since i know how broad the spectrum is in my field of expertise (its huge and i work in it obviously) i just have to assume the spectrum is still wide enough for doctors too.
You are your own advocate and are ultimately responsible for you.
Don't delegate the most important parts of your life.
Doctors will kill you.
Police will show up too late.
Lawyers will miss important details and defenses, and you'll be stuck with the consequences.
Accountants and financial advisors will squander your wealth.
Know how to defend yourself against violence. Read and understand legal documents before you sign them. Understand your investments. Ask questions.
And reject anyone who gets defensive when you exercise your right to control your own life.
Fire your doctor if they are offended when you advocate for yourself.
Fire your financial advisor if they get irritated when you sit and read the 40 page contract they ask you to sign.
Fire your accountant if they write you off when you ask them questions about your books or taxes.
These are your support systems, you want experts in your corner you can rely on. You want people you can delegate "sticking to the plan" to. But, ultimately, your life and freedom is yours. Do not delegate them.
I tried to pay different tax accountants twice, and get free advice from a friend that does taxes for billionaires. I'm 0/3 for having a professional get my taxes right. Luckily I've avoided any penalties over the years, though.
On the other hand, I asked my wife to give me a back massage, so she booked an appointment for me at the spa down the road. I wasn't expecting her to delegate that, but it was still nice...
So you're saying that all those scientific studies that prove you wrong with 0 that prove you right actually prove that the vast majority of scientists, pharmacists and medical doctors are "in on it"? You should work more on critical thinking, but I'm not expecting anything but personal insults from a person like this.
I actually know a guy that was on respirators and a medical induced coma for 2 weeks because of covid. Age 45, morbidly overweight. They saved his life. Still doesn't believe in covid and talks shit about doctors. Fits his personality tho as he once killed a guy because of a minor drunken disagreement (hit him in the face, the fall and trauma to the head did the rest, spent years in jail).
Got my second bout of COVID two weeks ago and my resting heart rate has been about 10BMP higher ever since (normal 55, now 65+). I only missed two days of workouts, but had much lower volume for over a week.
A quick google search shows this isn't that uncommon and it's one of those 'wait and see' situations. Frustrating and I wonder if there's a longterm consequence. Strangely, the first time I got COVID it had no impact on RHR. Second time I was hit much harder and couldn't leave bed for a full day, something that has never happened to me.
I've long feared that while different factions were bickering about the vaccines, the truth might be that the vaccines and covid both risk the kinds of tissue damage associated with the protein spike in some subset of the population. Medicine doesn't have perfect answers.
Lol this metaphor perplexes me. I don't have strong COVID opinions, but I'm really confused by this metaphor, is the plane crash full on COVID? Planes are safer overall of course, but if you introduce the Bayesian prior of given: you have been in a crash, which vehicle would you rather be in, car or plane? I'd probably say car. I got my COVID shot and largely agree that while the vaccine may have some risks, seemingly getting raw COVID w/o vaccines is probably worse. but i don't even care about that in this context, your metaphor has 100% taken me off work task :)
I'm pretty sure the plane is "living life vaccinated" and the car is "living life unvaccinated". They both have risks but one is riskier than the other per unit time/distance.
I do not think that's an insightful metaphor for the situation, nor do I think you made any effort to understand the nuance I was trying to convey.
It may very well be that this particular vaccine caused new health problems in some (likely small, but non-negligible) part of the population, and that the trade-offs involved still weigh heavily in favor of vaccination.
Absent mindless "if you aren't with us, you're with the terrorists" thinking, one might hope that the negative health impacts would be investigated and mitigated to further improve the vaccine technology.
They are still here beyond the peak to remind us that the vaccine has a 100% mortality rate, lockdowns (and the elderly) are worthless, and also that coronavirus is a "gain of function" bioweapon funded directly by Dr. Fauci.
We're just now really getting studies propagating into medical knowledge of a lot of this. I have covid-related tinnitus and despite the huge uptick in people reporting these symptoms post infection it took until this year to find a doctor that had specific interest in the subject.
Heart damage has been a known likely problem for a while, hopefully we're on the cusp of better diagnosis and treatment protocols.
It was the wildest thing. This bold new vaccine tech was 100% safe and 100% effective, and ready to go at the perfect time when we needed an excuse to reopen the economy
HN believes it because it's true. Your link (to a twitter post) says nothing to the contrary.
"People infected with COVID-19 before receiving a vaccine were 11 times more at risk for developing myocarditis within 28 days of testing positive for the virus. But that risk was cut in half if a person was infected after receiving at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine."
"Risk of incident myocarditis is more than seven times higher in persons who were infected with the SARS-CoV-2 than in those who received the COVID-19 vaccines"
"The incidences of myopericarditis after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination among adolescents aged 12–17 years were very rare; they were not higher than other important reference incidences."
The "seven times higher" study is complete fraud. I don't have time to debunk it, but if you want to see the mountain of evidence, follow the mouse that the former US Surgeon General got mad about recently:
I ended up with pulmonary embolism as a young (early 30s), healthy guy. Still not sure what caused it, but the doctor thought it may be COVID. The strange thing is that I never tested positive or had symptoms, though my spouse had it just before that happened. I have noticed an uptick in people having all sorts of "out of the blue" health problems shortly after COVID. It's hard to know what's related and what's not, because, while I'm sure there are many lasting effects we don't understand yet, it's always easy to just chalk up the bad things to being due to COVID.
I find it quite tiresome to read so many people be instantly doubtful when more progress is made in understanding Covid and long-covid, resorting to medical gaslighting as a defence mechanism to feeling inadequate or just not understanding what patients are suffering through. One would think we'd be in a medical age where we stop jumping to psychological conclusions as a way to explain everything and get sick people to retreat into their sad corners.
Reality is, its not all that new, is not solely attributable to Covid and there should/could have been much more research conducted a long time ago that would/could have laid way more ground work instead of researchers coming out with articles years after the fact that just reverberate what many have known all along.
Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC) overlaps other post viral fatigue syndromes associated with other infections. SARS 2003 also left many with a storm of symptoms that almost perfectly aligned with Long-covid. The infection itself may stem from a different virus or one related, so the onset of the infection, the aggressiveness of the virus, how quickly it peaks and how the immune system reacts, may be different, but many of the sequelas overlap. Many viral infection impact the body differently but devolve into pneumonia for example. So the connection between viral illnesses and ME/CFS and/or POTS may not be a specific protein, or specific interactions, but the shock to bodies, the response to a viral illness followed by secondary infections. The strain put on the immune system, the inflammation, the cytokine storm, etc.
Myalgic encephalomyelitis, also called chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS for short, has been affecting people for a long time. It has been triggered in people after viral infections. POTS risk factors as noted by Hopkins medicine (https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...) "may begin after an apparent or confirmed viral illness, but it can also appear following surgery and other health events."
ME/CFS + POTS (very often comorbid) like chronic illnesses have been cropping up for a long time. Due to the array of symptoms experienced by everyone, its made it hard to differentiate between the combination of potential symptoms and individual symptoms in isolation and the fact that there's no single test to diagnose ME/CFS. The diagnostic requirements for POTS are much simpler and clear, although a cure is also elusive. There has also been a severe lack of knowledge within the medical community, as these aren't resolved illnesses, so patients have been brushed under the rug, misdiagnosed and prescribed treatments which have often been counter productive and even harmful in many events. The complexity of it all and lack of explanations or solutions for patients has frustrated doctors.
Lets go back a look at multiple flu epidemics and their long term outcomes.
In "Historical Insight into Infections and Disorders Associated with Neurological and Psychiatric Sequelae Similar to Long COVID" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33633106/ they mention "Historically, the common symptom of altered cognition has been reported during earlier pandemics, which include the influenza pandemics of 1889 and 1892 (Russian flu), the Spanish flu pandemic (1918-1919), encephalitis lethargica, diphtheria, and myalgic encephalomyelitis (chronic fatigue syndrome or post-viral fatigue syndrome)."
In "Lessons from the 1918/1919 Influenza Pandemic" https:...
There's references from the ME/CFS community testing this back in 2010. Considering how hopeless and desperate these people are and how they test everything on or off label, solo or with their doctors, if it was as simple as that, millions of people would be cured. Thats like "Have you tried yoga?"
ME/CFS sounds like it has way many more possible causes, and different "types" of it.
Whereas Long Covid is caused by a virus that more and more is linked to endothelial damage causing microcirculation problems. And Fucoidan is almost perfect for that job.
Fucoidan (from seaweed) is the solution to any Covid aftereffects for much of the population. It directly solves these endothelial issues. Amazing stuff.
316 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19#Cause
> Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2)[2] is a strain of coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the respiratory illness responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2
source!?!?
stop fearmongering!!!
thats a preprint!!
despite such things clearly needing 3 years to begin existing while there was a need to react in the present.
so having a source is nice.
thats the odd paradigm of studies, either nobody agrees with it or everyone says “well, duh”
There was a sea of preprints pointing in different directions, and it was difficult to navigate and know whom to believe.
Someone believing something strongly 3 years ago based on a few preprints is hardly vindicated for having great process when published research comes out validating that view now.
IMO the only approach is to roll with the punches and to go "ehhhhh, mayyyybe." (And of course use the best weight of information we have now).
right, this was only obvious with particular education instead of relying on the educated, who were saying all sorts of random things in every direction.
Hindsight bias. We tend to remember our intuitions when we were right, instead of fairly measuring them. Thus, we become convinced we are reliable and experts are not.
Damage to other tissues, especially from mild illness, was a possibility that was neither well-supported nor well-refuted in 2020. It was clear there was morbidity risk, but the mechanism was not understood (and is still not well-understood) and the magnitude was also uncertain and confounded.
In this case, I started keeping logs of what people said what across social media. I noticed that they never revisit their theories and just go on to the next one. In one example, the people calling the existence of the virus fictional were same people that were having 5g hysteria for the next year, some of the same people that moved to theories that required the existence of that virus but to stick with issues about the vaccine. Everyone that took the vaccine is supposed to have dropped dead by now according to many individuals theories. But these are not being revisited, there is no “I was wrong about that” “what happened to 5g” “how come only a couple people have myocarditis problems in 2023 instead of 75% of the population, or more since the actual virus does the same thing” its just on to the next one
so I try to revisit which theories I made to at least address them
But we were all talking about this way back in 2020. People just have strange memories and attention windows.
Indeed, but IMHO the strangeness is in you (and many others): How do you are you still calling this behavior "strange" - as if it's inexplicable - after seeing it right in front of your nose for years (in many areas, not just covid)?
Think of it this way: I can predict when this behavior will occur (though not its precise presentation). So can you. What predicts - what strongly correlates with - this behavior of theirs?
\ \ \ \ \ \
(Answer, obscured to prevent accidental reading: xreactionaryxpoliticsx.xthexreactionaryxmovementxfabricatesxwhateverxsuitsxtheirxideologicalxgoalsx;xtruthxandxconsequencesx,xincludingxhumanxlifex,xarexdisregarded.xwhenxthexmovementxturnedxagainstxcoronavirusx(toxbexantiliberal)xixhadxnoxdoubtxwhatxwasxcoming).
> It has to be one of this century's most widespread conspiracy theories.
The same group of people believe all sorts of conspiracy theories.
Being too dead set in opinions not well supported is always error but only sometimes a problem. IMO, that latter part is a big part of why it can be so difficult to correct.
Because for them Corona is harmless and the flu is harmless, even worse, to them Corona and flu are the same.
Only the vaccines are dangerous.
Fun fact, for some of these guys the flu shot isn't a vaccination because it's called a shot.
The low efficacy is, at least in part, because every spring they make an educated guess as to which ones would be best to put into the shot distributed in the fall. Not all of them can be put into the shot for cost and compatibility reasons.
One might get allergy shots (no vaccine at all). One might get a shot of morphine in an ambulance. Liquid injections have been known as shots since before we had vaccines.
"Research has since shown that myocytes for the most part escape infection. Instead, SARS-CoV-2 damages the heart indirectly by unleashing inflammatory reactions that affect cardiovascular functioning."
What is the true narrative?
There were many get go’s, and one for each variant. I know a healthy person who got the original and then delta variant, the latter which attacked his pancreas and left him with type 1 diabetes.
> for most people or was fine but that it was dangerous for certain people with pre-existibg respiratory issues
For most people, it’s asymptomatic in the short term. We’ve known it would have novel systemic effects from the “get go,” because it hits a nasty receptor. With the flu, a cytokine storm and non-respiratory cellular damage is a fluke. With Covid, every infection—even the asymptomatic ones—damage the gut, testes, gallbladder and heart (ACE2).
We don’t know how that damage manifests in the long run, there hasn’t been a long run. But we know there is damage being accumulated. We just don’t know if it’s benign. (You can’t generally look at a body and tell how many times it’s had the flu. You can with Covid.)
Citations?
This is posted on a lot of the social media that prays on people with medical anxiety. Nothing credible is ever provided.
There are two sides to every polarizing issue like this. In this case, the Covid doesn’t exist crowd are loud and the Covid irreparably damages you crowd are hunkered down in their homes and sticking to their in group.
Well, there are more sides. It's the primitive human brain that breaks it down to a dichotomy.
I wonder if it's the same with other Primates.
Weren't the mortality rates something like 1% for adults? I remember being shocked by the numerical consequences of the "just infect everyone and get it over with" plans floated by some governments.
I forget who the statistician was that accurately predicted the mortality rate of the initial variants by just scaling the predictions down.
Mortality of subsequent variants trends down on average because of selection pressures.
My understanding is the effects are different. The vaccine-caused effects manifest in the young and are not understood. We can’t predict it nor even really detect it in autopsy and just see it after the fact as a statistical ghost. The exposure-caused damage is generally studied in the unvaccinated population; it creates measurable damage. (The recurring confounding variable is income and education; the unvaccinated are poorer and less educated, both within the country and globally.)
to wit, this article may be a way of deflecting the blame from the angry, invisible unicorns causing heart damage
edit: I can't help but imagine scientists typing lab data into a computer, and some random dude off the street who knows nothing about epidemiology is standing in the corner shouting "stop rushing!!! slow down!!!", and the scientist glances over annoyedly and slows down their typing slightly
Article from Sep 2020 for example.
https://www.science.org/content/article/evidence-builds-covi...
And there's a bunch of similar articles from March and April 2020.
Oh yes, I was definitely suggesting that the heart attacks were caused by covid.
Covid is notorious for messing with your heart. Right?
The worst thing is that the incidence of post-covid is hard to predict as it does not depend on severity of the initial disease. If you had a covid, you should be very attentive to a possible onset of post-viral symptoms.
Why? This might cause more harm than good, and if it's something that turns out bad enough, you probably don't need to be particularly attentive to notice it.
There is no standard treatment yet, but things that treat beriberi and pellagra do seem to work for post-covid as well, to some degree.
See https://x.com/erictopol/status/1689303073494335488
1. https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/new-research-offers-clues-to-...
Have you considered you might be depressed?
I have somewhat severe post-Covid symptoms. I took a look at the Beriberi symptoms list. I have every single symptom of both wet and dry beriberi.
Time for a Thiamine blood test.
Post-covid is mostly physiological. Sure, it may cause some cognitive and psychological manifestations as well (asthenia, depression, derealization), but without treating the underlying physiology there is no way out.
Are there any actual treatments though, besides "rest"?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UOyE-3PbJY
[1] https://www.hormonesmatter.com/
This one is:
@EONutrition
Mega Dose Vitamin Therapy: Viral Infection & Post-viral Illness
Many of those are so subjective that just posting it here is almost guaranteed to lead to people freaking out and seeking unnecessary treatment.
Just like "freaking out" can cause unnecessary doctor trips, telling people they're seeking unnecessary treatment can cause negative health outcomes. There are many minority communities (most of which have almost no representation on HN, but anyway) have a myriad of different factors preventing them from going to or listening to doctors.
Ultimately you can't control if someone "freaks out" or not. But you can share information that someone might use to protect their health.
How did you learn this?
There’s a difference between telling people to talk to their doctor if they have concerns and posting a list of symptoms which is likely to create concern where none of existed. Most of the mentioned symptoms are highly correlated with stress and anxiety. Listing them and encouraging people to pay attention to them is almost certainly doing more harm than good.
There is also no widely recognized evidence based treatment for any of this. Advising people to seek treatment is likely going to be completely unhelpful, or worse encourage people to go down some quack rabbit hole and start mega dosing vitamins.
Also I’d appreciate if you didn’t imply that cautioning people against posting this kind of medical advice was somehow anti-minority. I can guarantee you that no serious medical professional or minority health advocates are happy to see people posting these symptom lists on forums.
With the exception of loss of smell and taste, these are all also associated with stress physiology. The exact mechanisms are unclear, but lifelong anxiety sufferers will be familiar with many of these. I've personally experienced all of these since I was a young teenager/child. Well before COVID was around.
I don't want to minimize long COVID, because it is very real. But we should be careful about encouraging people with generalized anxiety symptoms to over-identify as long COVID.
When the body is in a fight or flight mode and there is no apparent danger, we tend to notice these much more. But overall, they are absolutely and without doubt harmless.
But there is a big difference: slow metabolic rate leads to eventual cell death (metabolic encephalopathy), while panic disorder is physiologically harmless in comparison. It's hard to distinguish between the two, and not every doctor is able to do that.
As an interesting observation, a metabolic disorder is not responsive to antidepressants alone.
Among the people I know and that I'm aware of, there are three broad groups (spanning age, sex, and numerous other traits):
1) People who generally ignored the fear that governments, doctors, and the media tried to instill. They disregarded the lockdowns and other measures imposed by government, and remained calm. They didn't take tests, they didn't wear masks, they didn't get any shots, and they generally went about their lives as best that they could as if nothing was happening.
2) People who bought into it, and got somewhat worked up whenever it was pushed by the media. They masked, they stayed indoors when asked to do so, they took tests when they had to, they got shots and maybe boosters, and so on. But once the media focus moved on to other topics, they pretty much forgot about it all and moved on, too.
3) People who became extremely paranoid. Some of them masked month after month, even while at home, which they avoided leaving for weeks at a time. They took daily tests. They've taken every shot and booster available. They lived in a constant state of fear for years. Even after most other people moved on, they didn't, or in some cases, still haven't.
The people I know who fall into the first group are consistently doing well, including those in their 70s, 80s, and even a few in their 90s. None have died, and none have had any major medical problems. I know that some of them don't even know if they ever contracted it, since they never got tested. If they had it, it was indistinguishable from any other cold or flu.
It's a mix for people in the second group, although this is a numerically larger group. Some have had major health complications, including cancer and cardiovascular-related issues, but they generally don't blame their health problems on having tested positive for infection at some point.
The third group are the only ones I hear of attributing ongoing health problems, no matter how minor or common, to a prior infection. Collectively, they now seem to have more serious medical issues, even among those who appeared quite healthy prior to early 2020. Also, I know that a number of these people are repeatedly testing positive for infection, even recently, despite having had numerous shots and boosters, and despite having supposedly overcome one or more prior infections that should have granted some degree of immunity.
I can't say for sure if it's the only factor, but a person displaying more fear/paranoia in the past and present does appear to correlate with more medical problems in the present, and a greater likelihood of attributing such problems to having had prior test-indicated infection(s).
The general mood there was anti mask from the beginning and anti vaccine once that emerged, obviously. And let me tell you, those people got FUCKED UP by covid. No one I know there has any grandparents now! They all died of covid. Several families lost a parent in their 50s to covid, several more to "pneumonia" since like you said they don't even test for it. Another handful are newly bedridden with mysterious illnesses that they're totally sure have nothing to do with covid. I'm not certain that they do either but it's hard to rule it out.
So I don't know man. I don't know who you know. But the people I know who ignored covid get wrecked by it. Every family touched.
The least-fearful subset tended to be in Ontario and Alberta, the central US, Eastern Europe, and India.
The most-fearful subset were in BC, Quebec, urban Ontario, the coastal and urban areas of the US, and urban Western Europe.
For the grandparents you mention in the cases you're aware of, were they in care homes of some sort?
In Canada, for example, neglect was allegedly a serious problem at some facilities, even leading to significant numbers of deaths there among the elderly:
"Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’"
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-mili...
Could something like that have been going on in the region you mention?
I personally knew someone in their 40s who died and two others around the same age who got hospitalised.
I knew several older people who died; I don't know how fearful they were of the disease, but given that it killed them they would have been right to have scared of it.
The mumbo jumbo idea that people were avoiding getting sick through positive thinking is nonsense.
The death counts from Canada's government officials from that era are very questionable, for example.
As early as June of 2020, the "public health" authority in Canada's most-populous city (and the 4th highest population in North America) revealed that the counting of deaths was being done using a methodology that sounds quite dubious:
"Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."
https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/127588839006028596...
BC was using a dubious counting approach as of April 2022:
"Fewer than half of COVID-19 deaths reported since B.C. changed counting methods were caused by the disease"
https://bc.ctvnews.ca/fewer-than-half-of-covid-19-deaths-rep...
Alberta was also using a dubious death-counting approach, as described in this April 2021 article:
"According to Dr. Deena Hinshaw, any death that has been flagged where COVID-19 is a possible cause is included in the initial count, even if the official cause of death remains unknown."
https://globalnews.ca/news/7814731/alberta-determine-covid-1...
Quebec's counting of deaths as of May 2022 (and apparently before that) was also dubious:
"Quebec’s interim public health director, Dr. Luc Boileau, has acknowledged that the province has seen a “huge” number of deaths linked to COVID-19. Quebec’s high death toll, he said last Thursday, is explained by the fact the province counts a COVID-19 death as any death involving someone who has the disease.
He said a government study from January indicated that around 30 per cent of the official COVID-19 deaths in the province’s hospitals involved people who tested positive for COVID-19 but whose principle cause of death was not the disease. He said about 40 per cent to 50 per cent of official COVID-19 deaths in the province involve people who had the disease but who died of other causes."
https://globalnews.ca/news/8801205/quebec-still-reporting-do...
As you can see, "the actual data" from that time period are essentially garbage, which explains why they often don't correspond well to real-world observations.
Also, given that your categories are basically politely-reworded "Heroes who didn't believe the evil lie that Covid is a serious public health problem that we should probably do some stuff about", "People who believed the evil lies somewhat but eventually learned the Truth" and "Weak paranoid stupid people who bought into all the lies and were consumed by fear and panic as a result", I'm going to go ahead and assume that you're not really coming at this from a perspective of honest inquiry.
So much for your anecdotes.
However, the cells cannot consume all that glucose despite the massive insulin presence due to a wrecked metabolic machinery of mitochondria, and the body remains hanging in a diabetic, insulin-resistant state of T2DM. If ATP demand is still not met, hyperventilation eventually reaches its peak state, and the individual starts experiencing shortness of breath. If this state of unmet homeostasis lasts for some longer time, the signs of pathological tissue hypoxia start to kick in, causing the appearance of neurological symptoms, which are then followed by metabolic panic attacks (crashes) when left untreated. After that, a more serious cognitive impairment may follow: slurred speech, partial vision loss, problems with spatial navigation, photophobia, etc. All those symptoms correspond to a border-line dementia and may signify the close proximity of a point of no return.
There are various groups who are now using machine learning to predict long covid based on reporting of symptoms and even immune features.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB5NclIemQ4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYNMzaZk_iU&t=3203s
Lots of budding research here on long covid / post covid conditions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=278vwGkFXRM
Also this sentence is just strange to me. The whole point of open science is peer review and truth I thought?
> An initial rush to respond to the pandemic produced a flood of observational and non-randomized studies in this area, he says, which spread more confusion than illumination.
The common "streetlight effect" bias comes to mind:
> A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
The "trust the science" messaging emerged only in response to a tidal wave of nonsense.
Do you really think anyone involved wanted to focus on PR rather than the real problem(s) at hand?
But I keep seeing stuff like this that seems to conclude that there is some correlation between the vaccines and heart disease.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9538893/
"Authorized or approved mRNA COVID-19 vaccines show increased risks of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the lining outside the heart), particularly within the first week following vaccination."
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
You know there's more than one COVID vaccine, right? Anti-vaxxers generally talk as if they don't know this, and you are talking that way here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_COVID-19_vaccine_autho... - "Ten vaccines have been approved for emergency or full use by at least one stringent regulatory authority recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO): Pfizer–BioNTech, Oxford–AstraZeneca, Sinopharm BIBP, Moderna, Janssen, CoronaVac, Covaxin, Novavax, Convidecia, and Sanofi–GSK.[1] Seven others are under assessment by the WHO: Sputnik V, Sinopharm WIBP, Abdala, Zifivax, Corbevax, COVIran Barekat, and SCB-2019.[2]"
"Of the 40 vaccines, 16 have a full or emergency authorization in only one country, 12 in ten or fewer countries, and 12 in more than ten countries."
Edit: Hm, the article is more of a summary/fluff piece. But I still think your argument is more appropriately disagreeing with the direction of science than it is a lack of the application of science.
I think the whole scientific edifice is or is about to become a bad caricature of the medieval Catholic Church, and is just as in need of a Martin Luther to remind everyone that integrity and a return to principals is long overdue.
For the vast majority of people, yes Covid is on the level of a cold. However for some of us, it's f*** scary. I knew in advance that if I caught it, then it would likely be bad. It's a scary proposition watching the political decisions and individual decisions being made and seeing that the country has basically decided that my life should be written off in favour of a little bit of crowd-pleasing and avoiding mild inconvenience. I have now had 7 vaccines, yet I still have no confidence that I would survive a second infection. That's a level of dread that is unhealthy having hanging over you all the time.
I was teaching at a course a while back, and I saw that the professor in charge of the department running it (who wasn't actually providing any of the teaching and didn't really need to be there) was sniffling all the way through the whole thing, and then a couple of days later I was contacted by an organiser saying that a whole load of people who attended had caught Covid. I could not believe the stupidity from someone who is actually very intelligent. It's an example of very mild inconvenience to just stay at home if you're unwell, because you have no idea if there's someone vulnerable that you're going to infect and potentially kill. I have seen multiple people in the last couple of months visibly unwell, admitting that their other half tested positive for Covid a few days ago, but not believing that they had it themselves and still going out and meeting up with people. That level of wilful ignorance is (in my mind) atrocious in this day and age.
I'm extremely lucky to have a job where I can work from home almost 100% of the time. I can't see this changing in the next couple of years at least. Partly because people believe that "In 2023, COVID is a bad cold/flu".
I think you need to understand that COVID is never going away. It will always be around and it will always mutate. "In 2023, COVID is a bad cold/flu" is completely true for 99.9% of the entire world, and people like you will need to figure out how to protect yourself, and it's obvious we need to do more research to figure out how to protect people like you.
It's obvious vaccines and masks did nothing to protect you which is really unfortunate because that has been the only strategy they have taken over the last 3 years. This is why I think studying what makes you different from others will help doctors and scientists figure out how to treat it.
But for the vast majority of us, we don't need to keep thinking it's more than a flu and we should figure out how to free ourselves from things like over-quarantining.
Bad flus are deadly.
> With the flu, we know that people are no longer contagious once symptoms are gone
Famously, Covid is different in that it can be spread asymptomatically.
Agree. Also, colds are deadly to some as well.
> Famously, Covid is different in that it can be spread asymptomatically.
This is another fallacy. All they did was test for the presence of the virus through PCR tests. But that doesn't show anything about infectivity. Every study I could find showed decreasing confidence over the years since 2020 that asymptomatic patients are actually infectious/contagious. Just because they can find the virus on you doesn't mean that you're infectious, those are two different things, and something that actually hasn't been measured properly.
2) Yeah, knowing why some people suffer more than others would be great to know. It probably is like trying to answer why some people get cancer. Genetics, circumstance, age, etc.
Those studies are flawed. They make no distinction between N95s, surgical coverings, cloth masks, and fit testing. Those are all huge factors. Properly fitted, high quality respiratory protection is effective.
One big failing on the messaging to the general public is not making these distinctions.
This kind of work is like trying to find effective strategies for reducing alcoholism or obesity rates when you know that many people will fill out a questionnaire with the answers shifted out of optimism or shame. Simple random controlled trials are challenging in those situations.
Who says this? My current understanding is do lateral flow tests. When your symptoms are gone and that is negative you're not very contagious anymore. Typically 3-7 days are the onset of symptoms in my experience.
After age, yeah, genetics, use of ACE inhibitors, coagulopathy, etc., account for a lot of the remaining risk of death.
1. I haven't seen any credible studies prove the total ineffectiveness of masks. Don't forget two things: preventing spread is never a binary issue, it is and always has been about slowing it down enough to give health services a break. Only a handful of countries made it their ambition to totally stop the spread, and even then its a matter of slowing it enough so it dies out rather than spreads. Masks are not hazmat suits.
2. There's a small percentage that reacts really bad, but it was large enough to bring health services to its knees and cause tens of millions of deaths globally. Then there is a much larger percentage that got it quite bad, people that didn't need to be hospitalized but were totally handicapped for months and months (or years).
Your last remark hints at a conspiracy, and with that you are the one who is fear mongering.
> 1) When is someone with COVID no longer contagious so they can return back to school/work?
From September 2023 paper linked below:
...numbers of exhaled SARS-CoV-2 RNA copies during COVID-19 infection do not decrease significantly until day 8 from symptom-onset. COVID-19-positive participants exhaled an average of 80 SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA copies per minute during the first 8 days of infection, with significant variability both between and within individuals, including spikes over 800 copies a minute in some patients. After day 8, there was a steep drop to levels nearing the limit of detection, persisting for up to 20 days.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.06.23295138v...
> fearmongering
Should catching COVID in a 20 seconds elevator ride concern anyone?
Our findings can be used to demonstrate future feasibility of estimating the amount of time it takes for an individual to exhale an infectious dose of SARS-CoV-2: For example, assuming a conservative estimate of infectious dose for COVID-19 of 300 virions (35, 36), a person exhaling 900 viral RNA copies per minute (as did peak shedders in our study) could be conservatively estimated to exhale an infectious dose in around 20 seconds (not safe for an elevator ride), whereas a person who is exhaling 10 viral copies per minute could be estimated to exhale an infectious dose in over 30 minutes (probably ok for an elevator ride) (37). Along these same lines, once the relationship between exhaled viral RNA and replication-competent virus is established, if combined with rapid SARS-CoV-2 detection methods, our device could be used to assist in development of an at-home infectiousness test.
Of course, it depends.
So the key takeaway is that a device that would help with your first question seems possible.
It would help your cause if you at least provided an example of such a study..
https://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/news/2023/aspirin-as-eff...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
"Among the more common lingering problems — affecting up to one-third of all patients with long COVID — is postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), which causes the heart to beat abnormally fast. [...] in people with POTS, the blood vessels may not constrict appropriately. Instead, the heart rate must rise even more than normal to compensate for the “lazy” blood vessels, says Lee Lewis. Conversely, the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in when the body rests, instructing blood vessels to dilate and instructing the heart to beat more slowly so the blood pressure goes down."
"Similar to POTS, if patients remain sedentary for too long, Anagnostopoulos says, they could develop cardiac atrophy; decreased stroke volume, meaning that the heart doesn’t pump enough blood out of the left ventricle during contraction; or compensatory tachycardia, characterized by resting heart rates that exceed 100 beats per minute."
A blood thinner or anti-inflammatory isn't going to treat the POTS or sedentary effects, and deprivation of oxygen is going to do longer-term damage to the heart. If you did use an anti-inflammatory, you'd have to use it at a low dose for a long period of time (months), but that's still not addressing the other issues.
Specifically vitamin D deficiency makes things worse and most people are at least mildly lacking.
It isn't entirely surprising given that the heart is in constant motion, unlike skeletal muscles which can repair while uncontracted.
> The human heart has only limited self-healing powers and a limited regenerative capacity. A damaged heart muscle and the resulting loss of function can usually not be fully restored. The reason for this is that heart muscle cells in the adult organism have largely lost their ability to divide.
> https://www.mpg.de/17679417/heart-regeneration-after-reprogr...
One description that always resonated with me is the tradeoff between capacity for repair and uncontrolled repair or cancer.
Think of two extremes: 1) no capacity for repair: once something is damaged, the cells don't divide and you lost functionality. But there can be no run-away growth or cancer. 2) infinite capacity for repair: damage cells can always be repaired but a bad instruction can cause run away division and growth and become cancerous.
So evolution has to figure out where to turn that knob. Do you want to allow repair at a risk of cancer?
Generally things that didn't get "injured" evolved to reduce repair capacity. Rarely (ever?) do you hear of heart or eye cancer. Those cells just don't have much repair capacity. But think of skin. That's always getting damaged, so it makes sense for there to be more capacity of repair there at the cost of more cancer.
It's all tradeoffs. And it can change over (generational) time. Consider a warring population, if people are getting killed younger before they have the time to get cancer, then that population will end up with more capacity for repair because it makes more sense for survival to repair because cancer never gets involved.
And the converse can happen, when long life becomes the norm then the tradeoff change and cancer prevention is more beneficial than total repair capacity.
Just painting with broad strokes here, it's not exact, but a trend that does show up between populations.
This is an article about how bad Covid is for the heart. Are you saying people are still making the anti-vax flawed neophobic claim that vaccines are worse than Covid. If that’s the case, I feel sad for those people suffering from their phobias.
Yes this is a dismissive way to reply but at some point there is no point in addressing theses theories on merit, providing evidence or reason to flat earthers and the like doesn’t persuade them and it instead it emboldens them somehow while they eagerly provide reams of willfully misinterpreted “facts”
At least you recognise that nothing you said was substantive..
Do you really think its impossible to conceive of the idea that pharmaceutical companies would orchestrate a global event with political institutions when they stand to benefit into perpetuity? Fine.
BPA?
Leaded gas?
Trollitis?
> An article entitled “Impact of complicated myocardial injury on the clinical outcome of severe or critically ill COVID-19 patients” in CJC by Professor Hesong Zeng and colleagues from Tongji Hospital Affiliated to Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, reported on the impact of evidence of myocardial injury among patients with COVID-19.
> Among patients with myocardial injury, hospital mortality was more than three times higher than the normal serum cardiac troponin level. Moreover, the levels of C-reactive protein, average 153.6 ng/L vs. 49.8 ng/L, and N-terminal pro-B-type natriuretic peptide, 852.0 ng/L vs. 197.0 ng/L, were significantly higher in patients with myocardial injury.
> It appears that prevalence of myocardial injury is high among severe or critically ill COVID-19 patients, who face a significantly higher risk of in-hospital mortality.
> Furthermore, the study suggests that it is important to monitor and manage myocardial injury during hospitalization for severe or critically ill COVID-19 patients.
> The chest computed tomography (CT) features of patients with heart failure are similar to those with COVID-19.
> Therefore, it is a great challenge to make a clear diagnosis early during the global pandemic, as pointed out by Professor Shenghua Zhou and colleagues from Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University in their article entitled “Comparison of heart failure and COVID-2019 in chest CT features and clinical characteristics.”
> For imaging features, both groups had ground-glass opacity and thickening of interlobular septa, but the ratio of central and gradient distribution was higher in patients with heart failure than that in patients with COVID-19 (4/7 vs. 1/12).
> It seems enlargement of pulmonary veins, lesion distribution, and morphology are highly important clinical findings to identify the chest CT features between heart failure and COVID-19. Additional research on the prognosis, evaluation, and management of cardiovascular diseases and cardiovascular complications in COVID-19 patients is essential.
https://www.acc.org/Latest-in-Cardiology/ten-points-to-remem...
For example, from Sep 2020.
https://www.science.org/content/article/evidence-builds-covi...
Several more articles and studies from March and April 2020 if one cares to look them up.
So yes, it was definitely responding to their claim.
These articles seem to be trying to point the cause of the damage to the Covid disease when the evidence unmentioned shows that the damage is coming from the vaccinations.
We check things with a pulse oximeter when feeling unwell and quite often we see elevated heart basal rates associated with infections, uncorrelated with body temperature. These tends to correlate quite fell with feelings of tiredness/uncomfort. I found it interesting that doctors most of the times feel entirely uninterested with this.
This is absolutely true and one part of the root problem. The other aspect of this is that most of the heart tracking devices we use live on the wrist and the data is of questionable quality and application. Many cardiologists know this and dismiss the devices and its uses wholesale, but that approach is wrong. The data isnt 'wholesale bad' its just bad at many things (hilariously, particularly bad at the things they advertise on the most). One of the things its GOOD at doing is noting when your heart is behaving differently from your baselines, which is why its generally pretty good at noting AFIB or pre-AFIB characteristics, for example.
This level of complexity on the issue, coupled with the relative lack of understanding with post-infection behavior/detailed immunoresponse, is definitely leading to some less than ideal approaches to patient care. and obviously the nature of COVID, being the first generally uniform viral infection of the entire population since 1918, being a huge wrench.
source: I am not a doctor in any way, my dad has a 30 year history of complex heart problems and i get to speak with his specialists a lot. like, 12 of them by this point. I work in tech and play with many types of health tracker devices regularly so it comes up in conversation.
I'd agree here. Most doctors have not really caught up to the giant data science revolution we have going on. A couple years ago I bought one of these [1] while trying to diagnose some general health/fatigue issues and after a year of data logging and life experiences it was pretty cool to watch how my HR/O2 numbers changed in response to various events - long bike rides, strength training, getting a cold, being on antibiotics, etc. The nice thing about this device was 1) it's much more accurate than smart watches and 2) provides raw time-series data vs some abstract fancy marketing UI.
At this point I now do comprehensive bloodwork panels at least quarterly and while I don't use the O2 device anymore I still have the baseline data saved. I'd recommend to anyone to start recording this type of data while you subjectively "feel good". It'll make it much easier to diagnose + press doctors on health issues if you can point to data associated with a time you felt well.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Wellue-O2Ring-Wearable-Sleep-Monitor/...
So I would say it is 100% due to the siloing and proprietary enshittification endemic to the industry. They don't want to help science, they want vendor lock-in.
Well, compared to psychology researchers, the medical researchers are doing pretty well on data science. I‘m not joking. In psychology, data science just doesn’t exist yet. P-values still rule the day and overfitting is a term they have never heard of.
I was very worried at first because one of my personally prioritized indicators of fitness was how quickly I could go from say, zone 3 to 50bpm. This was quite low, then suddenly I was having 70-90bpm around 30m after exercising.
Yet it gradually went away and I never actually experienced discomfort or anything like it. I haven’t seen a high restating rate in around 6 months. I’d say it lasted around a year, in total.
I can see why this condition could kill people with pre-existing heart issues or generally poor cardiovascular health. Having your heart working nearly double time at rest is a huge task when you’re already struggling. It was a great eye opener; I really don’t want to have this again and have it be the final straw that causes a heart attack.
That cardiologist told me that covid has no effect on the cardiovascular system and the heart cannot feel pain and discharged me to a PCP after running a handful of tests to rule out anything (Echo, EKG, labs, etc)
Now here we are in 2023, I have had long covid for almost 3 years and cardiologists are now admitting they are wrong. This article is pretty telling on the dismissive behavior and the truth catching up to them.
Not a surprise - almost everything initially said about covid was wrong; maybe next time people saying things should be so absolutely definitive about things they clear don't know enough about (yet). I would rather doctors hedged their advice/proclamations a bit, then to be definitive when they shouldn't be.
Then we'd be complaining that they're telling us two wholely different opinions.
Medicine, like science, is based on available data. I have no problem with them admitting they were wrong based on new data.
That is not 'science'.
I think this is being too demanding of doctors. Their opinion changed because the science changed. Discovery and understanding simply takes time. Practicing doctors aren't scientists, they aren't charged with the responsibility for discovering new disorders and treating them correctly on a per-patient basis. Their job is simply to understand the best available consensus about disorders and treat their patients accordingly. And... it sounds like your doctor did exactly that.
And it surely sucks terribly that the understanding was wrong. But that's not really the fault of your doctor. No one could have treated you better at the time except via dumb luck. It's OK to accuse them of being an asshole about it, but not really about being "wrong" so much.
My story I hope shows this exact sentiment mentioned in this article:
> “It’s important to acknowledge that these patients are suffering,” Anagnostopoulos says. “Many of them are young and unaccustomed to being sick or held back in any way from what they want to do. They often feel they haven’t been taken seriously. And what they want to know is that the doctor sitting with them is developing a plan for improvement.”
It's basically a converse take to the "You're not wrong, you're just an asshole" meme.
> As the COVID-19 pandemic was getting underway in early 2020, doctors in Wuhan, China, began to report that many patients hospitalized with the disease had cardiac injuries. Heart attacks were frequent, especially in patients with underlying risk factors, and there were numerous cases of myocarditis, which occurs when the heart’s muscle layers become inflamed. Roughly a quarter of patients with severe COVID-19 had elevated blood levels of troponin, a protein marker for cardiac damage.
Still was dismissive of covid having any effect on cardiovascular. But you can only learn so much in 60 minutes over 3 months right?
"Doctors report many patients [...]" framing is true of all sorts of nonsense, all the time (including about covid! Hydroxychloroquine was being boosted by the same kind of anecdotal evidence). That's... just not how medicine works. How do you know which anecdotes are nonsense and which are correct? You do the science. And they did. But not in time for a lot of people, and yes, that's awful.
And yes, what you state is exactly what the doctor should do. Otherwise you're taking all the testing and experience of all the other doctors that have already worked on this issue and tossed it out the window. When an individual patient shows anonymous behavior your document everything you can for future investigation. You don't get to play research laboratory on your patients.
That lasts until someone who is the CTO's buddy gets a hair and decides to get exec override, then pushes to prod, deleting the company financials.
And the medical equivalent of QA is generally a very awe inspiring strain of nurse.
All airplanes of the identical model have an identical manual.
No two humans respond the same to complex (or often, even simple) health conditions/situations.
Just because we don't have enough docs doesn't mean custom solutions are the enemy.
But the country we are left with has too few doctors, too many old people, and too many unhealthy people. We can argue until we're blue on why that is the case, but that does nothing to change that your doctor has about 5 minutes with you and an entire waiting room full of patients today, tomorrow, and the everyday after that to the point they are turning patients away in most places.
In recent years the medical profession has been shifting from being mostly an art to mostly a science. Clinicians are supposed to follow evidence-based medicine protocols rather than making things up as they go along because those produce better outcomes on average. They should only deviate from those protocols if the patient has some sort of contraindication, experiences serious side effects, or fails to respond. Unfortunately we still lack clear protocols for many conditions including post-viral syndrome.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjebm-2023-112311
The doctor says "Yep, Covid fucked you over"... What changes?
That doctor is not handing you out a candy bag of medicine to see what fixes your issues. Your "was training" is still going to be that "was". Now after some large number of people like you start showing up for the same issue, then some smaller portion of them get direct diagnosis (either post death, or during some other surgery), the doctors won't know what to do as a means of treatment. It's likely it will be years longer till we have effective means of treating long covid symptoms.
1. I would feel taken seriously.
2. I would still be seeing them to check-up on my health.
3. I would be discussing the budding literature to try promising things (i.e. atorvastatin, AT1RB, etc) - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9520195/
4. Other patients who are young and healthy are also validated (i.e. we are seeing more of you)
5. etc
The problem with western medicine today is that if you cannot be treated, they want you out of the system. The system is starting to get much better at adapting to these novel health challenges though. I suppose that will happen when there's 65 million across the world with these issues!
For example, I'm looking at my HCP's app right now and can schedule a call with my doctors as early as next week for an e-visit. For an in-person visit, it's closer to a month. But they have absolutely been taking my extra office visits due to my condition.
AI might eventually reduce charting workload slightly. A few vendors have launched new products in that space but they haven't had much impact yet. In the ideal case they might allow for an average doctor to squeeze in a couple more short encounters per day.
Long COVID's effects are so random and personalized that many people have to throw the kitchen sink at it until they find a solution that works for them.
back then no one knew anything about COVID. it's not like the doctor was hiding the truth. people are expecting them to be all-knowing is just being unrealistic. did you expect him to just pull out a magical pill from his back pocket to fix everything.
> I wasn't getting enough sleep and I focused on fixing that. A few months after that, my resting heart rate started to trend down and has come back to pre-covid levels. I don't know what to make of it all
Of course you know what to make of it all. You were obsessing over the metrics available to you, as many have done as well (myself included), and increased your overall stress levels, bumping your heart rate and making it erratic, and messing up your sleep, which only served to compound it all. You took a year off from strenuous exercise you said, of course it takes time to get your resting rate back down to levels before you were sick and when actively exercising. Imo there is no mystery here. Focusing on your sleep calmed your mind and your body followed suite, combined with the exercise having time to improve circulation and make you more tired to give you better sleep, which helps to lower your overall stress levels, which lowers heart rate, etc, etc.
The true question is, did the heart rate elevation cause you any physical issues, or was the issue only that you had visibility into the number. Or put another way, had it not been for 24/7 readings of your heart rate, and notifications from your watch, would it ever have manifested itself physically and been something you felt, and noticed. Based on everything starting out with "my watch would alert me" or similar, I'm gonna say if you're honest with yourself, had you not had a watch the issue might have come and gone and never been noticed.
Edit: here come the downvotes for the crime of claiming some things can be self inflicted esp when it comes to fitbit/apple watches. I've watched countless friends and family members fall victim to the obsession of metrics, freaking out about their heart rates all the time, etc. I used to do it myself. It's not a bad thing, but it is a thing, and people need to acknowledge it.
I'd upvote the former, downvote the latter.
I’m mainly pointing out that downvoting isn’t necessarily “you’re wrong” but often “you’re not being constructive with your communication style”.
I had had it off and on since the 1990s, usually for a day or two. But, after each Covid infection I had it for several days, the worst lasting a couple of weeks. Burning sensation in the breast plate, physically hot to the the touch where the ribs connected to the sternum.
Also consider that taking on strenuous exercise when you haven't done it in a while is going to cause elevated heart rates, beyond what your previous normal heart rate was during that exercise. Regular exercise will also eventually lower your resting heart rate. I think "starting a new strenuous exercise regimen" (because yes, after a year's break, that counts as "new") would also be unsurprisingly linked to elevated heart rates, even resting.
Certainly the burning sensation in your chest area is concerning, but did you rule out the more simple and common cause: acid reflux?
I agree that it's unfortunate that there hasn't been enough research on consumer health monitoring data, but I don't think your story says much about the cardiologists' diagnostic process. But I also expect that, with the general lack of understanding of the long-term effects of COVID, many doctors are not equipped to diagnose lingering health issues stemming from an infection.
But IANAD(octor), so what do I know.
Yes, that was my first thought too while reading the comment. A lower heartrate during exercise and resting is a strong fitness indicator. And pausing your exercises for a year significantly reduces your fitness. Of course you will see elevated heart rates.
That doesn’t sound like they ignored your concerns at all. It’s odd that you present it as such.
Then my wife went for hip surgery. We were told it was routine, everything is going to be great, less pain, better range of motion. My wife came out of the ER with the inability to move her leg, drop foot, nerve damage. She went in able and came out disabled. 3 big surgeries later, she can walk again. UCSF doesn't want to hear us out on anything related to that botched surgery and the surgeon has since moved to New York.
Dealing with medical professionals is like dealing with toddlers. You have to push them on everything or they simply do not care.
I get all my care done in Taiwan and everything is fine and the doctors all seem to be mostly happy with their jobs, and a few regular nurses like me because I look like a famous actor, so they're always pretty chatty and seem to be mostly ok with life.
I don't necessarily encourage medical tourism but simply fly to Taipei, find a doctor you want to see, and sign up for an appointment. It will be a little more work without the NHI card but still probably less than whatever you're dealing with. If you get medical scans, almost everyone can print a CD with them in a day or two if you ask. Getting care even without insurance was cheaper than just my US insurance premiums.
Having someone fluent in Chinese is important enough I'd say it was required but if you restrict yourself to a smaller sunset of hospitals and clinics that serve foreigners around like Tianmu you may be able to get by with a translator app.
People outside NHI are uncommon and their medical system isn't really set up to support it. You may want to consider actual medical tourism facilities of which I've heard of several in Mexico or Costa Rica.
You and your mother may also want to consider rioting, because the US system is deliberately and almost uniquely stupid.
Also, people don't realize, you can get health insurance in other countries. Prior to covid, I was an expat living in Vietnam and had very good full health coverage for about $4500 a year. I just found a local insurance broker who did all the paperwork for me.
That is, our general health cost picture and way insurance works is a subject of concern, but the bigger issue for this specific talking point is just general lack of safety net.
This isn't limited to the US. I am in the Netherlands and to the best of my knowledge Belgium/Germany aren't much better.
I'm not sure what you do, but lets say you're a programmer. You love programming and want to make the world better with it. Of course you also have $400,000 in education debt from becoming a programmer and need a job to ensure you don't end up bankrupt. So you get a job for $bigCorp that pays well. BigCorp tells you that you must push out 100,000 lines of code per day or you're out. You look around and all the jobs in what you do pretty much act the same way, and those bills are coming up at the end of the month. Now, you know you cannot turn out quality code at that rate so you cut back quality to a bare minimum to meet the metrics of continued employment.
Most doctors are in a similar situation these days, very few independent offices exist. They are parts of "GiantHealthCareCorpofAmerica,INC" that cares far more about how much the shareholders are going to make than how the patents are, even though each individual doctors would like to give better individual patient care.
Take away medical debt, triple the number of doctors, reduce pay to reduce selection pressure on $ chasers, etc. and you will start addressing causes of the symptoms.
I did a little adjustment to the numbers in the sense I put them closer to the numbers actual doctors pay for their schooling, not exactly programmer pay. On average doctors pay and programmers pay is very similar. Doctors schooling and programmers schooling is nothing alike at all. Moreso, it's far easier to get blacklisted as a doctor then a programmer for any number of reasons (programmer ethics, lol funny). Where you have more risks, more regulations, and more costs the more likely the default behavior becomes to toe the line.
My personal side project is finding and documenting ways to get treatment while avoiding the insurance system as much as possible. IMO you really should only see a GP in the sick-care system as someone to order the most basic labs and screenings, and to receive reports you seek out on your own from specialists who take cash payments.
You can download the US Preventative Services App, punch in your data, and see the recommended screeners for your situation.
https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/apps/
For accute issues like getting in a car accident going through the established system is still the best option.
I noticed a similar problem in other fields. The other day I spent an additional, unnecessary hour at the dealership, because the guy who was supposed to notify me that the car is ready... vanished. He had three other clipboards from other customers on his desk when I arrived to ask about the status.
My mortgage application process was, simply put, a dumpster fire - my form sat idle for a month until someone finally looked at it.
I feel as if all the accumulated karma from all my botched ticket estimates is finally coming back.
Let us know if this is true so we can prove the simulation hypothesis.
The idiomatic transfer is fairly obvious, although the implication of consequences if the admonished party is insufficiently contrite has become sort of optional, I think.
Glad you recovered. If you have an Apple watch be sure to also track your overnight HRV. (I have a Garmin). While many blood tests fail to be illuminating, RHR and HRV at least can indicate something is wrong. A high HRV/Low RHR is good, Low HRV/High HR is bad. And yeah, cardiologists are the worst when it comes to unexplained heart issues that are not picked up by an ECHO.
There’s solid research causally linking lack of sleep to high blood pressure the next day.
Gotta ask, what did you do for this?
Good sleep comes with good habits.
No liquid consumption near bedtime. Caffeine intake reduction and cutoff at least 6 hours before bedtime. Having a wind down routine instead of waiting on my body to tell me to sleep. (Use phone in bed instead of a computer mainly)
I was averaging less than 6 hours of sleep a night. Nodding off at work was common, and I would compensate with caffeine.
I still don't feel energetic, but I'm less tired now, and looking to increase my nightly sleep to 7.5 hours. It just sucks sometimes to get home at 7 PM and try to sleep at 10 PM.
Interestingly, I have an irregular heartbeat just normally, and have inner ear problems that cause my heart rate to change for doing nothing at all, and my watch has never made any warning about it.
The other doctor has a magnetic resonanz device (doesn't work...) and suggested to me homeopathy with the sentence 'i know people say it doesn't work but it works for my patients' (come on srsly? textbook stupidity...)
Since i know how broad the spectrum is in my field of expertise (its huge and i work in it obviously) i just have to assume the spectrum is still wide enough for doctors too.
I hate this.
I hope/wish for an AI doctor
Don't delegate the most important parts of your life.
Doctors will kill you.
Police will show up too late.
Lawyers will miss important details and defenses, and you'll be stuck with the consequences.
Accountants and financial advisors will squander your wealth.
Know how to defend yourself against violence. Read and understand legal documents before you sign them. Understand your investments. Ask questions.
And reject anyone who gets defensive when you exercise your right to control your own life.
Fire your doctor if they are offended when you advocate for yourself.
Fire your financial advisor if they get irritated when you sit and read the 40 page contract they ask you to sign.
Fire your accountant if they write you off when you ask them questions about your books or taxes.
These are your support systems, you want experts in your corner you can rely on. You want people you can delegate "sticking to the plan" to. But, ultimately, your life and freedom is yours. Do not delegate them.
On the other hand, I asked my wife to give me a back massage, so she booked an appointment for me at the spa down the road. I wasn't expecting her to delegate that, but it was still nice...
Good thing we're adding more Purell stations everywhere /s
lol jk no one even refills them anymore
So you're saying that all those scientific studies that prove you wrong with 0 that prove you right actually prove that the vast majority of scientists, pharmacists and medical doctors are "in on it"? You should work more on critical thinking, but I'm not expecting anything but personal insults from a person like this.
I actually know a guy that was on respirators and a medical induced coma for 2 weeks because of covid. Age 45, morbidly overweight. They saved his life. Still doesn't believe in covid and talks shit about doctors. Fits his personality tho as he once killed a guy because of a minor drunken disagreement (hit him in the face, the fall and trauma to the head did the rest, spent years in jail).
A quick google search shows this isn't that uncommon and it's one of those 'wait and see' situations. Frustrating and I wonder if there's a longterm consequence. Strangely, the first time I got COVID it had no impact on RHR. Second time I was hit much harder and couldn't leave bed for a full day, something that has never happened to me.
It may very well be that this particular vaccine caused new health problems in some (likely small, but non-negligible) part of the population, and that the trade-offs involved still weigh heavily in favor of vaccination.
Absent mindless "if you aren't with us, you're with the terrorists" thinking, one might hope that the negative health impacts would be investigated and mitigated to further improve the vaccine technology.
Heart damage has been a known likely problem for a while, hopefully we're on the cusp of better diagnosis and treatment protocols.
https://bpspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/bph....
"People infected with COVID-19 before receiving a vaccine were 11 times more at risk for developing myocarditis within 28 days of testing positive for the virus. But that risk was cut in half if a person was infected after receiving at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine."
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-...
"Risk of incident myocarditis is more than seven times higher in persons who were infected with the SARS-CoV-2 than in those who received the COVID-19 vaccines"
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcvm.2022.95131...
"The incidences of myopericarditis after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination among adolescents aged 12–17 years were very rare; they were not higher than other important reference incidences."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X2...
https://bpspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/bph....
The "seven times higher" study is complete fraud. I don't have time to debunk it, but if you want to see the mountain of evidence, follow the mouse that the former US Surgeon General got mad about recently:
https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Ajikkyleaks%20myocarditis...
Reality is, its not all that new, is not solely attributable to Covid and there should/could have been much more research conducted a long time ago that would/could have laid way more ground work instead of researchers coming out with articles years after the fact that just reverberate what many have known all along.
Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC) overlaps other post viral fatigue syndromes associated with other infections. SARS 2003 also left many with a storm of symptoms that almost perfectly aligned with Long-covid. The infection itself may stem from a different virus or one related, so the onset of the infection, the aggressiveness of the virus, how quickly it peaks and how the immune system reacts, may be different, but many of the sequelas overlap. Many viral infection impact the body differently but devolve into pneumonia for example. So the connection between viral illnesses and ME/CFS and/or POTS may not be a specific protein, or specific interactions, but the shock to bodies, the response to a viral illness followed by secondary infections. The strain put on the immune system, the inflammation, the cytokine storm, etc.
Myalgic encephalomyelitis, also called chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS for short, has been affecting people for a long time. It has been triggered in people after viral infections. POTS risk factors as noted by Hopkins medicine (https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...) "may begin after an apparent or confirmed viral illness, but it can also appear following surgery and other health events."
ME/CFS + POTS (very often comorbid) like chronic illnesses have been cropping up for a long time. Due to the array of symptoms experienced by everyone, its made it hard to differentiate between the combination of potential symptoms and individual symptoms in isolation and the fact that there's no single test to diagnose ME/CFS. The diagnostic requirements for POTS are much simpler and clear, although a cure is also elusive. There has also been a severe lack of knowledge within the medical community, as these aren't resolved illnesses, so patients have been brushed under the rug, misdiagnosed and prescribed treatments which have often been counter productive and even harmful in many events. The complexity of it all and lack of explanations or solutions for patients has frustrated doctors.
Lets go back a look at multiple flu epidemics and their long term outcomes.
In "Historical Insight into Infections and Disorders Associated with Neurological and Psychiatric Sequelae Similar to Long COVID" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33633106/ they mention "Historically, the common symptom of altered cognition has been reported during earlier pandemics, which include the influenza pandemics of 1889 and 1892 (Russian flu), the Spanish flu pandemic (1918-1919), encephalitis lethargica, diphtheria, and myalgic encephalomyelitis (chronic fatigue syndrome or post-viral fatigue syndrome)."
In "Lessons from the 1918/1919 Influenza Pandemic" https:...
Whereas Long Covid is caused by a virus that more and more is linked to endothelial damage causing microcirculation problems. And Fucoidan is almost perfect for that job.
So I really do think it could be "the one"