An unprecedented window into how diseases take hold years before symptoms appear

The "between-the-ears" brigade is at it again. Just asking questions.

For most people Ukraine and Gaza are just very remote worries, unless of course they're related to people there or close to the conflicts.

AI might be real stressor for those losing their job, or bad for those using it as a virtual love interest or therapist, but it's mostly a remote worry for most too.

Of the three, only the covid flu could have real mild/long effects. But if you want to seek other psychological factors, iflation, the job market, the loneliness epidemic, and other such things are much more likely ones...

As someone who has seen multiple people close to me, including my wife, struggle with long covid, I can tell you the answer is simply no. Anecdotal, yes, but this shouldn't be an argument.

We are several years in now. These statements are actually pretty hurtful for people who have been through a lot. It's like saying you could beat cancer if you only wanted to, or if you didn't think all those negatives thoughts, you wouldn't be so ill now.

Not only is it suggesting that this misery is in some way 'your own fault', but it also implies that it isn't real, or serious, at least not in the same way other diseases are.

And yes, psychological problems are real too, indeed. But it is not the same. The origin narrative around a disease does in fact matter for people trying to cope with it, and how others see you, for insurance, for politics and medical care. Please be more respectful about it.

The Gaza conflict has been running since before 1948 at various levels of intensity, and the Ukraine conflict since 2012.

It's possible that social media is making people ill, but long COVID is very real and very different.

> I wonder if, in parts, the effects of the so called "mild covid" and "long covid" […] are nothing but psychological. There seems to be quite a cloud of uncertainty around the vast array of reported possible symptoms.

Uncertainty does not imply psychological. It’s like saying ”our users report a lot of different bugs that we can’t reproduce, they must be all imagined”, except the body is OOMs more complex than even the most carelessly developed enterprise application. There is uncertainty in every part of medicine, all the time. That’s why it takes time and is difficult (often too difficult) to root cause everything that happens.

If you have a novel pathogen with neurological effects (see olfactory impacts - people literally losing their sense of smell), it would be my first guess of mysterious symptoms rather than.. checks notes the war in Ukraine? Honestly I’m not sure how to connect your first sentence to the next.

The very fact that you are hypothesizing about my intentions is, in fact, an act of asking questions on its own.

You are worried that I might be suggesting some form of conspiracy, but these worries are all in your head.

There is uncertainty about the effects post acquiring a covid flu. If there weren't, the article wouldn't mention the efforts in trying to figure out what these symptoms and causes are. I'm sure they are also "asking questions".

Instead of criticizing me, perhaps you could try to put your guard down and try to investigate if other more reputable sources asked the same questions as I did:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=psyc...

I haven't read those papers, and I'm not qualified to discuss them in depth. However, they indicate that my assessment of the situation is not as outlandish as you suggest.

Me neither, but there is a theory that Putin grew increasingly disconnected from reality when isolating himself from a potential Covid infection, and that this might have contributed to his decision to go all in.

Should this be the truth, there would be an actual connection between the virus and the war.

Do you think I was talking about the sense of smell?

That's very original but not the kind of thing I proposed.

I am sure there are many ways one could be disconnected from reality.

I would reframe this and ask whether psychiatrists should be spending a lot more time understanding the patient’s immune system history and other factors. Brain fogs and other symptoms are understood by many patients to be modulated by other health processes, and physical fitness is considered a treatment by some practitioners, yet psychiatry is recovering from a legacy of medical dogma in which the brain and the immune system are completely separate, due to the idea of the blood-brain barrier. I would recommend to look more comprehensively at patients’ clinically relevant information, which I believe would produce deeper, systems-level understanding and treatments in more than enough cases to be worthwhile.

Perhaps you are right. I took the vaccines and was pretty lucky to not suffer any major consequences.

What I said could be read as offensive and some kind of "your own fault" to laymen. However, that is not the idea.

I have psychological issues of my own and I completely understand when someone tries to say "it's all my own fault", so I'm empathetic to your critic.

This sounds like "you shouldn't suggest that long COVID is psychosomatic because doing so makes me or others feel bad" to me. Which part of what you're saying am I misunderstanding?

Doctors have a habit of blowing off unknowns as "it's all in your head" (as if that somehow makes it out of their jurisdiction). There used to be a diagnosis of "female hysteria." After the invention of the MRI doctors were able to see the physical damage caused by the disease and they renamed it multiple sclerosis.

>>There seems to be quite a cloud of uncertainty around the vast array of reported possible symptoms.

Just because it is a "cloud of uncertainty" to you does not mean it is to people actually studying the phenomenon.

Multiple studies are already identifying scores of biomarkers correlated with Long COVID, e.g., "Identified from 28 studies and representing six biological classifications, 113 biomarkers were significantly associated with long COVID"[0]. The same type of phenomenon happened with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, now identified as "Myalgic encephalomyelitis" where patients were long disregarded as simply having psychological problems, and the same with many auto-immune disorders. These can all be discovered with a sub-30second DDG search.

Yes, the democracies of the world are under assault from right-wing or authoritarian movements and this is dramatically increasing uncertainty, worry, and indeed harm for everyone. But before you start dismissing disease processes as caused by social psychologies and causing more harm to those already suffering, perhaps search for more concrete causes first.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36744129/

There is growing evidence that long covid is actually CIRS (toxic mold usually from living in water damaged buildings) triggered by covid. Only 25% of people have the genes for CIRS, but then it takes exposure and a immune shock to get your systems out of whack (lyme, covid, etc.) The vast array of symptoms come from the mycotoxins becoming present in every part of your body and affecting all your systems, especially your gut biome.

Source: I have it and am on the long road to recovery. Before I moved out of my house this spring, I could have days with several migraine level headaches and where my vision was so messed up I could barely see 10 feet. I don't have bad days like that anymore since I moved to my sisters. (I have lots of other symptoms too, this is just a sample.)

It seems you misread my comment profoundly. I never dismissed any actual biological causes.

It's ok, lots of people do this mistake. A more critical look would notice that I was only questioning aspects of the phenomena that are currently unexplained. In the long run, your pick for how to respond would sound rushed and desperate.

No, but loss of smell is indeed a (very well documented) ”mystery effect” of neurological damage, so it’s not a regular ”flu” by any means. It’s closest relative is SARS1 and that’s also vastly different from flu. There are always psychosomatic or ”mystery” effects even with something clear cut like breaking a bone. Noisy data is the first thing you have to accept dealing with these complex systems. If you see a giant cloud of black smoke, it’s a good idea to assume there’s fire and invalidate it later, should it turn out to be something else.

Absolutely. Academics in particular are hyper averse to saying ”we don’t know yet”. They’d much rather establish an unfalsifiable narrative which can mislead and cause damage for decades, until it can be properly reversed. Archeology is perhaps the best field at turning random early speculations into entrenched dogma. But it happens in all fields.

Ironically.

Do you believe the terms "neurological" and "psychological" are interchangeable?

> You are worried that I might be suggesting some form of conspiracy, but these worries are all in your head.

Because you communicate them. Combining unrelated information without any reasoning, backup, or even a link is a bizarre style. You go from wars, AI and lack of information about long covid to ignoring all physical markers.

And that doesn't take away that you argue in the same style as the people who argue that illnesses can be overcome mentally. Cancer originates between your ears; if you get it, it's your fault. Suggesting long covid is the same, places you square in that group.

> Instead of criticizing me, perhaps you could try to put your guard down and try to investigate if other more reputable sources asked the same questions as I did:

Fortunately, I am qualified for psych research, and if you would just open them, you'd see that those papers do not suggest a psychological cause for long covid. People are anxious, health staff is under pressure, those with long covid need psychological support, because it's hard to cope with, there's neurological damage, and there's some speculation about long-term effects on the population. There are obviously way too many papers to even scan.

You also did a wrong search, because "effects" are not what you're suggesting.

>>I was only questioning aspects of the phenomena that are currently unexplained

Right. The "God In The Gaps". Again. The refuge of those who lack an actual explanation. If that is what you meant, you should have explicitly stated it instead of requiring everyone to take "A more critical look [to] notice"

As I said before, there IS definitely a phenomena as the free world is under attack. But trying to bootstrap that into something much larger doesn't cut it. You protest too much; you'd have been better off just taking the lesson by itself. We all make errors

> I took the vaccines and was pretty lucky to not suffer any major consequences.

Lucky as in 999,990 chances on one million of being safe (myocarditis, see: https://labeling.pfizer.com/showlabeling.aspx?id=19542&forma... ). Long covid is a multi-percent risk by comparison, extremely larger.

It's insane how some people seek to blame a few pieces of RNA rather than the virus eating your arteries to reproduce. Medicine should of course be checked for safety but we're way past that. Of course people getting sick from vaccines deserve recognition and help but long covid patients just as much.

I took the vaccines because I trust them.

I'm talking about not suffering consequences of the virus because I decided to receive some immunization.

However, I was skeptical about mixing different vaccine types, so I took only one kind of it.

> Combining unrelated information without any reasoning

I estabilished a loose correlation that does not imply cause (they all happened roughly at the same time).

It seems you assumed what I was thinking by the writing style. A common mistake.

> Fortunately, I am qualified for psych research

Congratulations.

> People are anxious, health staff is under pressure, those with long covid need psychological support

Can you elaborate on the reasons why people are anxious and health staff is under pressure? I agree with it, but I want to understand why you think that is.

I don't quite understand your point. What is this "God In The Gaps" thing you mention?

"'God of the gaps' is a theological concept that emerged in the 19th century, and revolves around the idea that gaps in scientific understanding are regarded as indications of the existence of God."[0]

In this case, the analogy I'm making was to illustrate how you were trying to re-fit your original comment into the gaps in knowledge about the clusters of symptoms.

Unsolicited advice worth less than you paid for it: It was not an awful initial concept, but it was neither well thought-through nor well-presented. We all make mistakes like that, just posting an initial thought, but as you can see, that occasionally goes awry, and in those cases it's best to just take the L and move on. Be well

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps

> It was not an awful initial concept, but it was neither well thought-through nor well-presented.

I am looking forward to discussing such matters with people that are less compelled to observe style before content.

I don't have the time or the luxury to wear fancy clothes, that's why I'm here on hacker news, which is supposed to be a place that does not require them.

I do understand where you're coming from though.