<
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/09/mecfs-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-doctors-long-covid/671518/>
"Kira Stoops lives in Bozeman, Montana—a beautiful mountain town where it
sometimes feels like everyone regularly goes on 50-mile runs. Stoops, however,
can’t walk around her own block on most days. To stand for more than a few
minutes, she needs a wheeled walker. She reacts so badly to most foods that her
diet consists of just 12 ingredients. Her “brain fog” usually lifts for a mere
two hours in the morning, during which she can sometimes work or, more rarely,
see friends. Stoops has myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome
(ME/CFS). “I’m considered a moderate patient on the mild side,” she told me.
ME/CFS involves a panoply of debilitating symptoms that affect many organ
systems and that get worse with exertion. The Institute of Medicine estimates
that it affects 836,000 to 2.5 million people in the U.S. alone, but is so
misunderstood and stigmatized that about 90 percent of people who have it have
never been diagnosed. At best, most medical professionals know nothing about
ME/CFS; at worst, they tell patients that their symptoms are psychosomatic,
anxiety-induced, or simply signs of laziness. While ME/CFS patients, their
caregivers, and the few doctors who treat them have spent years fighting for
medical legitimacy, the coronavirus pandemic has now forced the issue.
A wide variety of infections can cause ME/CFS, and SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus
that causes COVID-19, is no different: Many cases of long COVID are effectively
ME/CFS by another name. The exact number is hard to define, but past studies
have shown that 5 to 27 percent of people infected by various pathogens,
including Epstein-Barr virus and the original SARS, develop ME/CFS. Even if
that proportion is 10 times lower for SARS-CoV-2, the number of Americans with
ME/CFS would still have doubled in the past three years. “We’re adding an
immense volume of patients to an already dysfunctional and overburdened
system,” Beth Pollack, a scientist at MIT who studies complex chronic
illnesses, told me."
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: September 29, 2022
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-72625064
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
