41–50 of 134 posts
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To use a computing analogy, which doesn't map perfectly onto the body, if consciousness awareness is userland, you can have things go wrong which are localised in ring 0 - brain drugs will be to some degree effective on those, that doesn't mean it's fake or made up.
In reality there are fuzzy boundaries and feedback loops everywhere. SSRIs treating this isn't any more mysterious than NSAID painkillers being somewhat effective for acute depression.
It's probably a whole set of feedback processes that get screwed up, hence the panoply of symptoms, inserting a hard stop into one part of the loop can be enough to kick the system back into a better functioning state.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every study that suggests viability of SSRIs to treat or prevent Long COVID presents plausible mechanisms for why they might have that effect. And none of them are "the patients are probably just sad and faking it."
Symptoms caused by sadness are not necessarily fake.
The problem with “Long Covid” as it exists today is that there’s no such definition. Literally anyone who had Covid once and feels bad today (and quite a few people who never had a confirmed case at all) includes their set of symptoms in the communal diagnosis. Thus, if you dig into these studies, you always find that the syndrome is a wide-ranging and variable constellation of symptoms, making it impossible for a study to have any systematic legitimacy. Moreover, the results of any particular study are more strongly influenced by the inclusion criterion (if there even is one) than by any other factor.
It’s perfectly possible to evaluate treatments in this situation, and would be a better use of resources - pick symptoms, make an inclusion criteria, and run a randomized trial of existing drugs or therapies. But this is likely to fail, and it’s much, much easier to write papers with unprovable theories and retrospective analysis.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Given that the major COVID-19 vaccines had a significant protective effect against Long COVID, Are there studies for this?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9905096 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38388-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65302-0 Do you need even more?
In 6 months they'll be in the comments on the next article about covid railing against the vaccine again. It's never enough with these guys, because it's not about being right or wrong, it's about having their feelings validated. They feel like the vaccine was bad, facts be damned.
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Before you can investigate the causes of an illness, you have to define it. Otherwise, you’re chasing an ever-shifting cloud of ambiguous symptoms, any of which could have different causes. The article opens with this admission, so I’m not stating anything new here. The problem with “Long Covid” as it exists today is that there’s no such definition. Literally anyone who had Covid once and feels bad today (and quite a…
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There are studies that show significant immunomodulatory effects of SSRIs.
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Before you can investigate the causes of an illness, you have to define it. Otherwise, you’re chasing an ever-shifting cloud of ambiguous symptoms, any of which could have different causes. The article opens with this admission, so I’m not stating anything new here. The problem with “Long Covid” as it exists today is that there’s no such definition. Literally anyone who had Covid once and feels bad today (and quite a…