91–100 of 134 posts
Long COVID may be fueled by inflammation and tiny clots (2026)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260107225532.h...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Morgellons isn’t a real disease. It’s a mental health condition. SSRIs do not “work on” those other conditions, but depression is highly comorbid with serious chronic illnesses. SSRIs improving some symptoms is to be expected when depression symptoms overlap with the condition.
I'm somewhat open to this line of thinking, but it seems in these cases, there is a very fuzzy boundary between the symptoms of depression and "the real illness": brain fog, lack of energy etc. I've seen healthy, active and successful people be affected, where the cause of "long covid" seems unlikely to be psychological. But there is no denying that, shall we say "a certain type" of person seems to be overrepresented…
It is possible for someone with depression to misdiagnose themself with Long COVID or CFS if they don’t understand the conditions. A lot of people will avoid mental health diagnoses in favor of other explanations because they don’t want to accept that they have a mental health condition.
Where you’re confused is that these conditions are not exclusively defined by “brain fog” and lack of energy.
CFS has specific criteria such as specific post-exertional malaise that set it apart from depression in a very concrete way. Any informed practitioner or screener for study acceptance is going to identify the difference.
Onset also matters. If someone claims they developed Long COVID and the trigger was a bad breakup with no known case of COVID it’s easy to dismiss. A key feature of Long COVID is that it starts with a case of COVID.
As for your posts: The fact that you included Morgellon’s (a fictitious disease akin to delusional parasitosis) with other real conditions suggests that you are picking up some weird information from somewhere. Please don’t speak so confidently about these topics you don’t understand. Curiosity is good, but dismissing other people’s conditions as mental illness is really awful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Water fasting is used to differentiate from dry fasting, where you don't even drink water.
Is this even a thing? Never assumed you'd ever want to dehydrate like this on purpose. Just why?
Personally, the only long Covid symptom I know of is that I have a coughing fit after every meal (and sometimes during). Some foods seem to lead to worse fits, but anything other than liquid will make me cough to some degree. Sometimes, it’s to the point that I see stars and nearly pass out.
All in all, I got off easy with Covid. It could have been worse.
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…
Sometimes the symptoms are so ambiguous that it is hard to nail anything down. It’s the same thing with Lymes disease, which is definitely a real thing, but there aren’t good, reliable tests for it. It takes a long time to manifest and the symptoms vary wildly from person to person.
There are actually good, reliable tests for it. However Lyme disease (not Lymes disease) became an alternative medicine explanation for everything vague and many people became obsessed with thinking they had it based on vague symptoms like fatigue. When they couldn’t get positive test results to confirm their belief, the Lyme disease online communities established the idea that the tests cannot detect their version of the disease. It’s a belief that allows anyone to diagnose with Lyme disease in a completely unprovable way.
> and the symptoms vary wildly from person to person.
This belief is an unfortunate result of the online Lyme communities encouraging everyone with any unexplained symptoms to believe it’s caused by Lyme disease that can’t be detected. When the disease becomes redefined as being untestable and causing wildly different symptoms in everyone, it becomes impossible to say that anyone doesn’t have it. If you have any vague symptoms like feeling tired, a Lyme disease community will encourage you do believe that it’s caused by an undetectable case of Lyme disease.
There is a lot of strong evidence that these patients do not have Lyme disease, but they’re always good at coming up with another reason why they have it but it can’t be detected in them specifically
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…
Welcome to alternative health :))) there are many functional doctors, and others who perform this kind of stuff. For example Organic Acids in Urine Test gives you some 70-80 metabolic markers, which some folks interpret. There's no large scale RCTs or studies on this, so it's a bit dubious. But I did one and the practitioner correctly read the leaves to suggest some things that were missing and which helped me (gluta…
The alternative medicine people use these tests because when you measure 80 different things you are almost guaranteed that some of them will come up high or low.
What they don’t explain is that many of them are expected to fluctuate and will show up with very different values on different days or depending on what you’ve eaten or when you’re taking the test.
They like it because they can tell you that you are too low in this thing and therefore you need to take this other supplement, every time someone takes the test.
For someone who isn’t getting answers from regular doctors it feels like a miracle that someone finally tested them, diagnosed them, and gave them something to take with a simple explanation of why it explains everything. This is the perfect recipe for placebo responses, which are common.
The forums are interesting to read because most people who do these and take the supplements will be very positive at first, but then over time they go back and take another test and find the results are completely different because it’s so random.
Organic acids tests are mostly only useful in the context of diagnosing specific genetic deficiencies which produce severe changes in the test results. The minor ups and downs that the alternative medicine people try to use are not diagnostic, especially with only a single test.
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 pas…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Morgellons isn’t a real disease. It’s a mental health condition. SSRIs do not “work on” those other conditions, but depression is highly comorbid with serious chronic illnesses. SSRIs improving some symptoms is to be expected when depression symptoms overlap with the condition.
I'm somewhat open to this line of thinking, but it seems in these cases, there is a very fuzzy boundary between the symptoms of depression and "the real illness": brain fog, lack of energy etc. I've seen healthy, active and successful people be affected, where the cause of "long covid" seems unlikely to be psychological. But there is no denying that, shall we say "a certain type" of person seems to be overrepresented…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leading research into Long Covid is already doing this. You’re seeing neural and auto immune clusters gathering around certain immune dysfunction and previously rare diagnosis like Small Fiber Neuropathy. Autonomic dysfunction is being measured in young and healthy people also, and that has its own set of objective testing. Everything you are saying is happening. But because the suspicion seems more and more that it’…
> You’re seeing neural and auto immune clusters gathering around certain immune dysfunction and previously rare diagnosis like Small Fiber Neuropathy. Everything I've personally seen in this space is exactly what I described: they start with a set of people who claim to have the illness, then go on a statistical fishing expedition to look for "signs of immune disfunction" (or whatever, but you're right that these res…
There are two fairly strong clusters of findings that are objective, repeatable, and consistent. And that is the autonomic testing in long COVID patients is coherent in its dysfunction, and so is the Small Fiber Neuropathy testing that is now consistently showing abnormalities.
Lets go step by step.
Small Fiber Neuropathy. Nerve fiber density is a count with age/sex-normed reference ranges. In previously healthy post-COVID patients with no diabetes and no risk factor, then the test shows whether the nerves are there or they aren't.
https://jdc.jefferson.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1284&c...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.04.25323101v...
https://www.neurology.org/doi/pdf/10.1212/NXI.00000000002002...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12847426/pdf/fnhum-...
We have brain structure changes showing in the UK Biobank studies https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9046077/
Associations with complement dysregulation https://www.cell.com/med/fulltext/S2666-6340(24)00041-2
Muscular abnormalities in long COVID patients reporting reduced exercise function https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104327602...
Potential that persistent infection shows up in Long Covid patients in abnormal rates https://www.massgeneralbrigham.org/en/about/newsroom/press-r...
If your argument is that people are showing up with abnormalities, then diagnosed with Long Covid, then spurious biomarkers are associated to it - you are just wrong. Wrong multiple times. Demonstrably so.
What we are seeing is more likely to be exactly what it looks like - an novel condition being captured by downstream effects of previously unknown or understudied mechanisms.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You’re seeing neural and auto immune clusters gathering around certain immune dysfunction and previously rare diagnosis like Small Fiber Neuropathy. Everything I've personally seen in this space is exactly what I described: they start with a set of people who claim to have the illness, then go on a statistical fishing expedition to look for "signs of immune disfunction" (or whatever, but you're right that these res…
Then you should fund it. The entire field is to my understanding absolutely starved of science funding. There are two fairly strong clusters of findings that are objective, repeatable, and consistent. And that is the autonomic testing in long COVID patients is coherent in its dysfunction, and so is the Small Fiber Neuropathy testing that is now consistently showing abnormalities. Lets go step by step. Small Fiber Neu…
The MRI studies are particularly egregious examples of this. Just because you see a difference on an MRI does not mean that the difference is due to the thing you’re blaming. In fact, it almost never is.
> If your argument is that people are showing up with abnormalities, then diagnosed with Long Covid, then spurious biomarkers are associated to it - you are just wrong. Wrong multiple times. Demonstrably so.
I am? I have now followed every link. Literally every paper you posted is following this exact pattern. I don't know how you could possibly conclude otherwise, unless you just didn't read past the titles.
They each take a (typically small) cohort of people who self-identify as "long covid sufferers", they subject them to random combinations of tests, and report only what they find to be significant. It's literally the XKCD comic about jelly beans.