Many people whose symptoms of COVID don’t go away after the virus is considered cleared by currently available testing are being discounted by their doctors and written off as “psychiatric,” especially women. This many people reporting symptoms lingering couldn’t be “crazy” “exaggerating” or “hysterical”, and the number is growing. Insurance companies are denying people’s claims for services they legitimately need, and often even when their primary care physician does take them seriously and refer them to a specialist it can take 3-6 months for people to obtain an appointment to specialists who understand long COVID and do take it seriously.

Doctors, and the medical industry as a whole need to come to understand that infections more often than previously believed don’t just end after the pathogen is gone. They leave a “calling card” of wreckage in their wake. This can include neurological problems, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, post-exertional fatigue, vascular problems, digestive problems and many others.

The system is set up in a fragmented way and doctors are still not educated holistically to view the body’s systems as affecting one another. This can often make things so compartmentalized that they miss the big picture.

It’s high time that modern medicine became modernized to embrace the microbiome model and to understand that not every infection leaves a person unscathed after the acute phase disappears, and that a series of infections in one’s lifetime can build on one another creating wear and tear on the immune system and hamper overall function. There is also a need for better and more sensitive testing and doctors should be trained not to discount results that do present themselves in current tests as often happens.

Similarly, chronic Lyme Disease, Sarcoidosis, and other conditions have long been thought just to “go away” like the common cold after the acute phase has passed, but increasing numbers of specialists are beginning to discover that many more conditions can become chronic and systemic than they were taught in medical school, requiring treatment and monitoring for many years and sometimes for life.

Rather than focusing mostly on vaccines, the federal government and medical professionals need to put more time and money into further research geared towards treating COVID and other conditions’ lasting effects. While neither doctors, nor patients, nor insurance companies want anything to be chronic, ignoring when it is just adds insult to injury, and these long-term ill patients must be treated with dignity and believed when they bring their symptoms to the attention of their doctors, and insurance companies must be required to cover their care regardless of whether it has been covered before. Each patient has unique needs and it’s time those working in these service systems acknowledge and respect what helps each patient. In complex and poorly understood conditions flexibility is key to bringing back quality of life to the patient; https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1nAKEawAlMbKL