From their own article:
> He praises the study, which was difficult to perform because of the amount and quality of data, but adds that it is limited because it does not break the data down by key factors, such as the participants’ medical history. “These are very important questions we need answers to,” Putrino says. “We don’t have any really well constructed studies just yet.”
The study also doesn't seem to control for comorbid mental health issues. The pandemic caused a massive spike in anxiety and depression, which (by themselves or due to medications) can result in the same symptoms used to diagnose long Covid in this study: brain fog and fatigue.
There really is nothing to report here yet.
I totally disagree with this. When omicron started spreading, a lot of scientists jumped to the conclusion that it was less lethal than previous variants. They were happy to share positive-sounding news, regardless of whether they turned out to be wrong. At the beginning, the evidence (from South Africa) was far from conclusive.
So yeah, not a representative study at all.
And I'm someone who's somewhat concerned specifically about long covid.
I am too, but it is not surprising. It's getting them page views. We're also going to be seeing "long covid" articles for years to come as it's going to be a goldmine for research funding.
But why do they need page views??? It's not like they're going to go bankrupt if they lose advertising revenue. Their greatest asset is their brand name, and they're destroying it for... what?
It makes no sense.
But many other drugs can cause these sorts of symptoms too including anti-depressants paradoxically.
I think long covid exists I just think there is also a lot of psychosomatic long covid and until we have a good diagnostic criteria to differentiate the two it'll be really hard to study it.
I've had both consistently for about 2 years now, along with some other neurological symptoms post-covid (no clinical anxiety or depression though). It's made me more of a believer in listening to other people's experiences.
And that makes studying and treating cases like yours and their's more difficult.
I also 100% believe that psychosomatic diseases are real and need to be taken seriously, they just require a different treatment plan than persistent auto-immunity or permanent lung or heart damage.
But here is an actual study that goes against this story. Will you believe science or myth? Are there enough excuses to keep the myth alive?
The study also doesn't include omicron, so whether the shots protect against the latest variants is also unknown.
Vitamin D and K interact with cartilage.
Vitamin D deficiency and severity of covid infection correlate. As does obesity. Obesity causes vitamin D deficiency.
Brainfog is a symptom of covid and causes some people to fall down levels of maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Falling down maslow’s hierarchy of needs causes anxiety.
Anxiety depletes the body of B vitamins. B vitamin deficiencies can impact on glutathione production. Glutathione deficiency can impact immune function.
Spinal alignment/stability helps one maintain focus. Poor spinal alignment causes the brain to burn energy on proprioception. Causing mental fatigue, ie brainfog.
When the body is under stress the cellular membranes become less functional. I think this an immune protective mechanism (speculative). I think you can control cellular permeability with lipid ratio ingestion and calorie management. Cellular permeability affects the mitochondrial energy production and immunity. It makes sense that cellular protection is optimised over energy production when recuperating from a viral illness.
The brain impacts the immune system, there is immune memory stored in the brain.
I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome 4 years ago after contracting a chinese flu.
I am writing this because when people write the word psychosomatic I think the same thing. I just think no-one in medicine has a comprehensive understanding of what psychosomatic is.
I also think long-covid is worse than chronic-fatigue. The base damage is worse, then there is the same viral borne psychosomatic condition layered over the top of it.
What the people safely ensconsed up maslow’s needs hierarchy often fail to understand is the immense stress felt by the people sliding down it.
Incremental motivation and autonomy is hugely important to mental health. The homeless and mentally discounted don’t get much. So there’s this often unarrestable downward spiral.
When you land literally on the floor. The way back up is swimmers stretchers an arm, then a leg, then a leg, then an arm. Build up that spinal strength and propioception with whatever spare energy the body has available to it. It takes at least six months and there are numerous crashes.
You need to eat really simple foods because the brain goes into ptsd mode and hypersensitivities emerge.
You need a really comfortable bed because you are in constant pain and can’t sleep.
You need to know you won’t be homeless because the anxiety will wipe out the b-vitamins faster than the you can ingest them.
The support groups will tell you you have a 5% chance of recovery.
I think it is a psychosomatic illness as well but medication won’t help. I also think some people’s immune systems end up in such a state of depletion that it is just a pure untreatable illness for them.
If you try and communicate any of this in the midst of brain-fog the natural assumption is that you are whinging and crazy. Forgiveness helps, anger management helps.
I think permeability of the membrane inner ear is the underlying causitive mechanism of long-covid chronic fatigue syndrome. You need really good potassium concentration in the inner ear for proprioception to work effectively. Lying down plus the cellular stress permeability response depletes this concentration. Hypermobility exacerbates the problem, the membrane is partially cartilagenous.
This leads to brainfog and fatigue when moving. You have to build yourself up really slowly and there are alot of critics. Outwardly you don’t look that terrible.
I spent time figuring this out to get better. Now I work in telesales because a failure mode of the prefrontal cortex (requiring the most brain energy kind of) is that you tend to talk alot.
I’m getting better, slowly crawling back up Maslow’s hierrarchy. No doctor told me any of this.
I got lucky, didn’t believe my diagnosis initially. (Takes the average person 7 years to be disgnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome). I asked for the most alternative physio at the practice I went to for the constant pain. He wouldn’t discuss the condition at all but he got me doing swimmers stretches and propioception exercises.
I can do sideplanks now. What people don’t understand is that your energy doesn’t collapse immediately. It takes up to 72 hours post exertion for the mitochondria to be overwhelmed and the fatigue and brainfog to kick in.
It is very easy for people to arrive at a place of learned helplessness. It is very easy for family members to question your behaviours from the perspective of mental illness. When you yourself don’t understand why your own energy is collapsing.
You can’t differentiate psycho-somatic from the physical. All that will help it is treatment plans that assume there isn’t a psychological cure in and of itself. Physical therapy is hugely important. More research is required into the base damage of the corona-virus. Then the treatment plan needs to regularly tweaked till it gets to the point of basic health maintenance.
No-one’s getting rich of this so I can’t see it happening soon.
My dream is a better collaborative information system for treating chronic illness. I think people are overly focused on causative mechanisms. Body’s heal themselves given the right conditions.
I wish a company existed where people report their pre-existing conditions, symptoms and medical test and diagnostic result then get given a best-practice treatment plans. The results of the treatment plans are monitored using fitbits. Then incremental adjustments are made to the treatment plan using machine learning to search for symptom dopplegangers and discover what worked and what didn’t for other health dopplegangers.
I don’t know why this doesn’t exist. I think the returns on medical research are getting less and less. The body is multisystemic and everybody is unique. But with 8 billion people there are loads of symptom dopplegangers. We don’t need to know why something works to know that it works. The search for why has diminishing return with each level of complexity. A smaller and smaller percentage of the population can afford the latest medical treatments. Medical research is expensive and wasteful. The top of maslow’s hierarchy is really saying that there is no need for why just being.
I think collaborative sympton doppleganger machine learning optimised treatment plans should be the future of medicine. It is what computer innovation should be about.
There should also be a whole lot more research into vitamin-d vitamin k and cholesterol metabolism. This is an intersection of multi-systemic conditions where membrane permeability, hyper-mobility and anxiety correlate.
You can test for hypermobility by straightening your elbow. If it goes backward even a bit, delve further, you are bendy and may need to manage that bendiness proactively.
Immunity isn't one thing that wanes.
T-cells are largely permanent and cross-reactive. Somatic hypermutation means that you have B-cells to variants which don't exist yet which can be quickly activated if you encounter them.
There's more to the immune system than circulating NAbs.
The 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic was a bit of a nothingburger because after mutating in pigs for at least 50 years, people born before 1957 still had cross-reactive T-cells to the H1 protein so old people were already immunized.
This is not the human immune system's first goat rodeo with a pandemic virus.
That's your choice, and it's your right, but it's absolutely bonkers, and if you think it should be mandated, you're a totalitarian.
See https://postimg.cc/HjjsR2SF for a overview of the results.
It is not clear (to some who follow the matter reasonably in their time) how permanent the damage will be, but for example the first article that results to a search, the "famous" recent "similar in magnitude to the effects of ageing between 50 and 70 years of age",
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258953702...
mentions 10 IQ points lost in a number of patients months after hospitalization... They note: «it is very possible that some of these individuals will never fully recover».
So it may not be covid specific but it does seem to exist and with a wide ranging illness such as covid then obviously more overall people have it than from say pneumonia.
This alone is not convincing, since hypochondriacs have never been rare in the first place and for the past few years have been encouraged and doubtlessly felt very vindicated.
I suppose that 1) vaccines increase the rate of specialisation of naive T cells to mature t cells (hence the number of naive t cells diminish supraphysically)and I also believe that
2) those specific mature T cells, generating covid spike protein specific antibodies, have lost some or total ability to fight non-covid diseases as a cost of specialization. 1) would increase thymus involution rate and therefore age speed of immunosupression.
2) would reduce generic immune ability (learning other pathogens)
3) I believe the increased immune profile after a vaccine induce a long lasting (at least 6 month) increase of accelerated aging process in humans, via increased inflammation and therefore apoptosis, DNA mutations and oxidative stress, although in a mild form and hence in the medium term asymptomatic.
Above all the premises I enumerated, the 2) is the one I would draw the most attention to, which can be reformulated as: do the repetitive administrations of a vaccine (here the 3 mRNA doses), reduce the effectiveness of the immune system for future non-COVID diseases, and even more importantly, does those doses reduce the immune learnability budget and therefore do those vaccines reduce the effectiveness of future vaccines against the next non-COVID pandemic? There has to be a limit to immune memory, the question is, after how many vaccines do the effect become non-negligible on aging?
study backing chronic inflammation and therefore accelerated aging: > vaccine-induced hypermetabolic lymph nodes https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34857663/
study backing the depletion of lymphocite T helper cell production: Study Shows Immune Cells Against Covid-19 Stay High in Number Six Months After Vaccination https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/....
Moreover, I have an issue understanding why would vaccine not massively lose effectiveness after the age of 70 since at 70 the thymus has ~completely involuted (although maybe the stem cells in the bone marrow suffice?).
I'm not a medical professional, so I suspect that my opinion is just as much gibberish as yours clearly is, but with more self-awareness.
Anyway, why would that "budget" be "for vaccines" _only_ ? Vaccines trigger the same mechanism as actual viral attacks, so you may as well ask "does the human immune system have a limited budget to respond to repeated viral attacks". It's the same question. And consider what answer would have better evolutionary fitness.
OK thank you layman for your ad-hominem, I have extensive expertise in medecine and pharmacology and have extensively studied the thymus, spleen, associated peptides and immune and aging biomarkers, so what seems to you as gibberish is actual valid statements or for a few ones, very reasonable and necessary to be asked speculations. But indeed, an expert is often difficult to distinguish from a bullshitter when the layman lacks discernment, a formation in epistemology nor care to check any of the sourced premises.
> why would that "budget" be "for vaccines" _only_ ?
Well for starters I do not question wether there is a budget limit, there is it is a fact. I even explain in detail that a necessary component in the equation are naive lymphocite T and that aging and environement stressors induce an atrophy (involution/shrinkage) of the thymus and therefore of the total number of differentiated mature lymphocytes T. Also obviously I do not say that this only apply for vaccines, real covid is not much different from the spike protein and in fact induce more damage, however the question has to be asked, regardless.
> consider what answer would have better evolutionary fitness
and yet having a limit is an evolutionary fitness as show the existence of thymus involution, both for reduced energy use and programmed aging evolutionnary benefits as shows the many papers on the topic. Obviously, as you should have guessed, the limit only matter to not be reached before the age of reproduction, which is < 20 years old
