Post-viral sequelae have been poorly understood for many years.
1. It's hard to tie together the
cause and later effects/symptoms. Did someone get a viral infection? Common cold? Flu? A bacterial infection? People who aren't familiar with this typically have just felt sick, and sometimes the trigger can be a subclinical infection they don't notice.
2. Conventional medicine is bad at acknowledging, researching, and treating chronic conditions. Need an arm chopped off? Thyroid irradiated? No problem, surgery is excellent. Need pills to mask symptoms for years leaving the root cause untreated? Again, modern medicine has you covered. But if yout CBC panels are OK and you just have a malaise, nobody knows what to do.
3. Doctors have a somewhat justified hubris in that if something didn't exist in their med school, it must not exist at all. Sure, people come in with WebMD printouts and can claim all sorts of nonsense, but this leads to kneejerk defensiveness instead of an open mind.
I was infected in 2014 with some unknown, probably viral infection, which cause my thyroid to become inflamed for several months. This can also happen with mono. Anyway, this caused serious, wide ranging effects in my body, specifically causing autoimmunity. I now had serious food sensitivities I never had before.
Not knowing this, I kept eating these foods and after 3 years I was so immensely fatigued and brain fogged and dizzy I could barely walk to the mail box.
After 6 doctors and $20k of diagnostics I finally some solutions. Recovery took years, increasing fast at first and slowing down later. My recovery amounted to cutting out several key foods/drinks out my diet and supplementing for a while to fix deficiencies caused by all this.
My advice if you have this is to be proactive. Nobody will fix this for you. Your doctors probably won't care, so find one that will. I found a doctor that would talk for 1-2 hours in an appointment and go over everything I was learning (yes, she was expensive) Read as much as you can, avoiding the innate human desire to find a magic bullet solution (there is none). Follow up on what your doctor told you and research the snot out of everything you heard.
Long COVID is the first time that cause and effect have been linked and known for so many people. Unfortunately it seems this is exactly what it will take to get taken seriously by the medical profession.