Dr. Suzanne O'Sullivan
speaker
271 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr. Suzanne O'Sullivan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
It's for people who are struggling without a diagnosis it can explain a lot and it allows people enter a community where they can get support and they can get treatment with antibiotics which don't work but gives them the sense that they are being treated. Lyme disease is a very good example of how Medicine is an art.
You know, it's not a matter of someone comes to see you and you think they have a bacterial infection. So you do a blood test and they either have it or they don't. Tests are so much more sophisticated and hard to interpret than that. You know, every single blood test we do, every single brain scan we do. It comes with 100 caveats.
If you live in a Lyme disease area, there was a study in the UK in a place called the New Forest where there's loads of Lyme disease and foresters who work there, something like 25% of them will test positive for Lyme disease if you test them. It doesn't mean they have Lyme disease, it just means they've been in this area for a long time. You have these kind of variables.
And this is a problem in Lyme disease. If I wanted to make a lot of money, I could diagnose a lot of people with Lyme disease by doing that blood test and telling them you've got an abnormal blood test and therefore you have Lyme disease.
Well, it's not they have Lyme disease. They've been exposed to the bacteria. They've had an immune reaction and antibodies and they never got sick and therefore they fought it off. Perhaps they had a really mild case they didn't notice.
People are kind of aware that perhaps mental health problems and things may be a little overdiagnosed now, but they don't think quite so much about how the parameters of physical diseases have changed and led to overdiagnosis. It's fine that we do what we do as long as people are able to go to their doctor and ask the right questions and understand the issues.
How it came about is so interesting, really, because as a hashtag, it appeared on Twitter. An Italian woman tweeted hashtag long COVID on the 20th of May 2020, raising awareness about chronic symptoms after COVID infection for the mildly affected.
Well, that's precisely, you know, we're already predicting disability for millions. And we haven't even had time really for chronic illness to develop. But this concept that a mild illness could lead to chronic disability took off after that hashtag. It was shared throughout the world. And this story spread the concept that the mildly affected could develop long-term symptoms laterally.
You know, it went from Twitter to mainstream news to medical newspapers with phenomenal speed, with no scientific study whatsoever, with just it being sort of a word of mouth.
There was so much that was counterintuitive to this being related. Let's just say that, of course, there are people who have chronic symptoms. If they were hospitalized, I volunteered in ITU during the pandemic. I saw how bad things were. You would not be surprised a very sick person would have chronic symptoms. Also, all viral illnesses cause chronic symptoms in a small proportion of people.
There is really good evidence that most people, however, with long COVID probably didn't get it related to the virus, but rather to the kind of idea of long COVID. Firstly, it's a different population. So people in hospital were older people with diabetes. They were mostly men. People with long COVID were younger people, healthier people and mostly women.
And studies that have emerged have been very interesting, like loneliness is a precursor for long COVID. A study in Germany followed health care workers from the beginning of the pandemic and people who had an expectation of symptom severity developed long COVID. So if you expected to get it, you got it. Depression. I kept hearing brain fog. I'm like, we're in a pandemic. Our brains are foggy.
And that point is so important because what they were doing in the studies at the beginning on long COVID is they were surveying people. They were self-diagnosed, and a self-diagnosed person is more likely to get long COVID. And they all had huge constellations of symptoms, but there was no control group.
And later, when they'd had time to do the science properly, and they were now comparing people with long COVID with people who were in the pandemic who didn't get COVID, They also had hundreds of symptoms.
So science of long COVID was very poor at the beginning. And the general public was scared witless by this concept that they could get chronically ill even if they weren't hospitalized. And much like other people I've described, like the lady with Huntington's disease, if you think you're going to get chronically ill, then a small proportion of us will get chronically ill.
I don't want to be dismissive of it because it served a very important purpose. There were people dying and that was terrible. And there were people losing loved ones and that was terrible. And there were people losing jobs and that was terrible. But there were also a lot of other people who were suffering and there was no space for them. Where did they go?
People at home alone with nobody to talk to who weren't necessarily physically very ill. Long COVID gave them a voice. It gave them a group. It gave them a place to go and it gave them a name for their suffering that other people gave more respect to than just we're all in a pandemic and I'm having a horrible time. Nobody had any sympathy for that.
So it served an important social purpose.
I think it's kind of a multifactorial. Lots of people have to change a lot of things that they're doing. First of all, as a medical community, we need to really challenge this assumption that early diagnosis works because we've been diagnosing cancer, blood pressure, diabetes earlier. We're not making anyone any better.
I think we do need, and this might sound a bit strange, to dial back on some of the mental health campaign awareness work that we're doing because there was a very interesting study out recently that showed that raising mental health awareness in schools actually added to emotional distress rather than subtracting from it.
Showing 241–260 of 271 · page 13 of 14
← Previous
Next →