Coronavirus Week 119: Long COVID and medical stubbornness, tribalism and racism

Zeynep Tufekci, in her first Substack piece in some time, and linking to and extracting from a recent NYT column by her, talks about the medical stubbornness and tribalism. She begins by noting that something we could call "Long Spanish Flu" happened a century ago and got ignored by the medical establishment, somewhat similar to initial reaction to Long COVID.

I'll in turn extract from her:

(E)verywhere I looked, I saw hugely-important issues and dynamics that, to this day, are underappreciated. 

This particular piece focused on our response, especially our inadequate and even confusing and poorly-done research efforts. But there’s so much more to cover. 

To start with: how medicine dismisses things it doesn’t (yet) understand, and worse, refuses to learn from episodes that make the denial hard to maintain. Post-pandemic or post-epidemic discovery of complicated post-viral conditions occurs again and again in history, to be forgotten till the next time. 

Post-viral ailments pop up in so many areas: cancers, neurogenerative disorders, chronic complex conditions and who knows what else, and yet, while the dots are hard to connect, and not enough is properly researched to begin with.

It gets better. She then notes how, in the past, things like ulcers and even multiple sclerosis were once thought to be all in your head, to use the old cliché.

She finishes by calling for a National Institute for Postviral Conditions.

One place where she does NOT go, interestingly, beyond the "all in your head," is race-based biases in diagnosis. A century-plus ago, this happened with diabetes, when it was considered an upper-crust White person's disease.

Well, enough Black sufferers feel they've been excluded enough on Long COVID research that they have formed their own support groups.