The Causes of Long Covid

I had a long process with this that mostly manifested as exercise intolerance and general inflammation/discomfort, and sleep struggles. I made no progress for 2 years, lost most of my muscle (I had been very active before) and started thinking "is this how it's going to be forever?". After not finding anything promising from traditional medicine or supplements, I finally made some dramatic life changes. I'm fully past it now (with persistent lifestyle changes), but I really had to rethink my relationship with food.

Ended up doing a paleo diet, avoiding stressors (some of which are not obvious like just being on your phone scrolling, bad posture/circulation/sitting for too long), improving sleep hygiene, and ramping up consistent cardio exercise, with an emphasis on getting up to 4x/week zone 5 cardio without triggering intolerance.

Since then I've discovered a lot of other things that are great for overall health, like HRV-reset breathing and long-duration water fasts (around 3 days is optimal for me). I imagine those would have been very helpful if I had tried them earlier. A water fast is a complete metabolic and inflammatory reset of the body, and it's not as hard as you might think.

Hopefully most affected folks have recovered and are living normal lives by now, but if not, there are things you can do! It seems like the more challenging those things are, the more efficacious.

A non-inflammatory rocket shock diet can certainly aid in symptoms of long covid in many users, often people megadose on antioxidants to dilate their recovery window and not regress. Glad to hear you are feeling better and I totally agree that movement and diet are key in recovering from inflammatory disease.

Maybe a bit of a strange take, but after having dealt with chronic illness personally and talked with a lot of others with chronic illness, I don't think classifying chronic illness by symptoms will help with curing, and in fact I don't think categorizing works at all for chronic illness. We've been trying to classify chronic illnesses for so long, and yet in most cases no pattern emerges.

This has led me to conclude that perhaps in most cases chronic illness is an emergent behavior from a complex system, namely our body. Now tbh this is kind of a cheap take, because it's not that hard to conclude. But gosh darn it, we're programmers and we deal with complex systems all the time! What I want to see is a complete quantitative mapping of human metabolism, so that we can see all the in-between steps, not just the surface levels. That way curing chronic illness is more about comparing metabolite levels against known pathways and seeing what's regulated incorrectly. There's just not enough introspective capability currently.

My vision is some day a person who's been chronically ill can walk into a clinic, take a blood test, and with mass spectrometry get the level of the around 1800 different intermediate metabolites. That gets mapped to a known good metabolic graph, and it's optimized to find what in-between step is off kilter. They're then prescribed a drug that resets the bad state, and it 6 weeks they're back to normal.

I also doubt that AI will substantially help either. It still doesn't bring any more introspection capability, and if we can't figure out why someone is sick, I have little faith that a predictive AI can figure it out either.

Also, many people have cured chronic illnesses such as Crohn’s disease by moving to countries with low levels of those diseases.

Thanks for the link! I looked over it, but I'm not seeing quantitative levels of reactions. That's been my biggest issue with current pathway databases. It's great to know what's connected to what, but very quickly it becomes everything connected to everything. And unfortunately everything doesn't reduce the problem space.