The Long COVID Alliance says that this chronic condition has impacted 9.4 million Americans"and counting. As shown below many more millions of people are suffering with long COVID and getting little medical help. Long COVID has become its own unique epidemic. This is what a major published medical study in The Lancet said:
"Patients with Long COVID report prolonged, multisystem involvement and significant disability. By seven months, many patients have not yet recovered (mainly from systemic and neurological/cognitive symptoms), have not returned to previous levels of work, and continue to experience significant symptom burden."
"The comprehensive assay of symptoms spans 10 organ systems (neuropsychiatric, systemic, reproductive, cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, immunological, head-ear-eye-nose-throat, pulmonary, gastrointestinal, and dermatologic)."
This sounds as bad as the COVID infection pandemic, but it is happening after people recover from the infection but are not dying or being hospitalized. Yet they are really suffering.
This is the sad truth. Huge numbers of people who survived initial COVID infection are plagued with many health problems greatly reducing their quality of life. These are now well known as long COVID victims. Despite lives severely impacted, they have been receiving very little help from the medical establishment. And a major article in The Washington Post documented that working age long COVID victims unable to work at their jobs have had little success in getting benefits from insurance companies and government agencies. So, in addition to serious health problems many face economic disaster
The medical issue
A key problem widely known is that physicians have been unable to document through usual testing that long COVID victims have a true medical illness when they complain of multiple serious symptoms. These are salient observations made in this article:
"Patients cite a litany of symptoms that defy verification through basic medical tests. They become exhausted at the merest exertion. They can't remember simple words. Their hearts feel like they are fluttering. Yet neurological exams, EKGs and chest X-rays come back clean."
"Doctors said in interviews they are treating long covid patients who are clearly too sick to work but who have difficulty meeting the evidence threshold insurers demand: objective medical test results showing an inability to perform work."
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledges gaps in medical knowledge regarding long covid. It warns doctors not to rely solely on heart, lung and brain tests to diagnose the syndrome because the symptoms are so difficult to measure.
"Lack of laboratory or imaging abnormalities does not invalidate the existence, severity, or importance of a patient's symptoms or conditions," the CDC cautions in its official guidance.
Wide ignorance of a key medical test
If there is recognition of the proven biological or physiological basis of long COVID, then victims could be given a test used in many circumstances. What research has shown is that long COVID victims have what has been found in many who were infected by the virus or received mRNA COVID vaccines. They likely have micro blood clots throughout their bodies as a result of spike proteins impacting small blood vessels. Micro clots impede oxygen flow to body organs and the brain, with many possible health impacts.
And a well-known medical test has been successfully used to determine if there are extensive micro blood clots in a person's body. It is the D-dimer test. High values prove that extensive clots are present. Yet this medical test seems to be unrecognized by long COVID victims, their physicians and, in some cases, their attorneys. It is essentially "the missing link" in providing victims with medical evidence that their myriad symptoms have a physical explanation.
Relevant medical research
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