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

(www.bloomberg.com)
202 points helsinkiandrew | 2 comments | 18 Jul 25 08:55 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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alganet[dead post] ◴[22 Jul 25 09:57 UTC] No.44645032[source]▶
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klabb3 ◴[22 Jul 25 11:58 UTC] No.44645789[source]▶
> 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.

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1. terminalshort ◴[22 Jul 25 12:36 UTC] No.44646115[source]▶
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.
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2. klabb3 ◴[22 Jul 25 13:49 UTC] No.44646890[source]▶
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.