Alan Levinovitz

And again, I guess that's just the risk of being out there.

And I want to say up front and center, whatever I'm experiencing online, some kind of online pylon, it's nothing like being...

debilitated by a severe chronic illness and told by your family and friends that you're faking, that it's all in your head, that it's fake, that long COVID isn't real.

So I keep that in mind.

Yeah, I get a little scared if I get an email that's cc'd to my department head or I get people coming up with petitions calling for things to be changed or whatever.

But at the end of the day, this is a group of people who have suffered something far worse than I can imagine.

Yeah, so it's tough to summarize the article.

I mean, it is about long COVID, basically.

What's the state of the science on long COVID and what explains that?

And in order to tell that story, I had to get into the world of what's called myalgic encephalomyelitis, chronic fatigue syndrome, which goes back many decades.

But long story short is this.

No one really knows what causes long COVID other than sort of by definition, it's triggered by a COVID infection.

And no one knows why some people's symptoms last longer.

There are biomarkers that have been proposed to show that the symptoms are real, which they are, of course.

But we don't know whether those symptoms are caused by chronic stress, by infection, by deconditioning, by some combination of all of those.

And...

The problem is that all of those things that I've said, stress, deconditioning, some other kind of infection, these are arguments that people in this world have heard many, many times.

And they've heard these arguments in the context of people trying to dismiss their illness.

So to tell them that, in fact, they are manufacturing these symptoms through having wrong beliefs

And if only they could resolve what is purely a psychiatric condition, which they're choosing not to do or something like that, then they would be healed.