Alan Levinovitz

Like, it's just like a ridiculous position to take.

And so in that sense, what these people are experiencing, the symptoms they're experiencing, they are physiological, they are debilitating, and you can't just change your mind about it.

So I think a lot of people believe that

If only these people could just think differently, they would magically be healed because it is a belief state that is creating their symptoms that could not be further from the truth.

What the brain retraining people say, and I hate that term because it sounds very woo-woo and it's kind of bullshitty.

But what these folks say is actually much more like what an addiction is.

specialists might say, which is you have a physiological state that is going to take a long time to recover from.

Right now, we don't have a lot of good interventions for it, but we've seen a lot of success with slow, steady progress in communities that share stories that are positive and help people stick to certain plans.

And sometimes people relax, and sometimes these plans don't work, and no one is saying that you are choosing to experience these symptoms.

But why not give it a shot?

That, I think, is a lot more like what's happening here.

The only difference, and again, I don't have to talk to you about this, obviously, but people would say, well, there's a big difference.

These post-acute infection syndromes aren't caused by choices I made in the past.

And it's like, whatever, man.

Are you blaming addicts for their state and you're saying you're different from them fundamentally because you didn't choose to get infected by a virus?

But that's also cruel.

And that's also misguided.

So I would push back hard on that objection to the analogy I'm making here.

Either way, the broader physiological point remains.

And I just think it's really important that people see that.