So, folks, as promised, my thoughts on the subject. Upon return from my travels (BTW, with COVID acquired on the plane from the woman next to me who clearly had it) I re-read the article on my computer, and found it even more interesting and relevant than before, and not because I am now better prepared to avoid long covid, but for many more reasons.
The article goes far beyond long covid and also links it to other mindbody conditions, since, thanks to Paul Garner, we can can fairly confidently consider a mindbody condition.
We often say on this forum "I could see myself on every page of this book" - and it is true for this article. It comes to the conclusion that many TMS patients and TMS practitioners have been arriving on for a while: any organ and system in our body can be attacked by a malfunction in the nervous system and brain processing patterns, chronic pain is just one of many cases. I apologize for habitually using term "TMS" here, just because it is short and familiar to all of us, but please note that I understand that I should be using a term "mindbody disorder" here.
Here are the points that I found the most important to me in the article:
1. Freud, with his theory of conversion, was correct in relating a childhood trauma to physical illness in the adulthood. What Freud missed, was a narrow focus on how trauma can occur. We now know that some people on this forum (me included) were not able to link their illness to a childhood trauma, because the trauma could have occurred later in life as a single event or accumulate incrementally. The critics who found one hole in the theory tried to fail the entire theory because of its incompleteness - which was wrong. Dr Sarno who followed Freud, nevertheless inspired the search for psychosomatic healing regardless of the age in which the trauma occurred.
2. Definition of a trauma that could trigger TMS needs to be widen and include not just purely psychological events, but also physical injuries, viral infections etc.
. Injury or viral infection will heal with the medication or otherwise, but psychological trauma would linger. She says: "an interruption in the brain processing that facilitates the executive function of your legs—a blip that could be triggered by all sorts of things". I specifically would like to exclude for a moment the case from the NIH-sponsored study of people with long covid who were never infected with covid - that is a curious but rather trivial case for us on this forum, we know what a fear and good imagination can do to an anxious person. The mechanism of a viral respiratory infection impacting the nervous system is not well studied and I can't wait to see more published in this area. Same applies to autoimmune conditions like RA or neurological like multiple sclerosis. In case of MS we do not have any evidence that it can be healed through mindbody methods - unless I just don't know of those.
3. At least one study found the link between long covid and anxiety disorder - anyone here surprised? The observation by Dr. Sharpe that obsessive focus on symptoms worsens the symptoms themselves. The story of the woman in the article who developed symptoms of degenerative dementia, same as her mother had - it is the same as my story of developing CRPS, just like my grandaunt had! But it is not that simple: both she and I developed some symptoms at first, and then descended into the full-blown disease fueled by fear of a hereditary condition. But why did we we develop similar symptoms first and then remembered that there could be a link, could there still be some predisposition, and what are the mechanisms? And, of course, were her mother's and my grandaunt's diagnoses as false as our own?
4. Disproportionally high incidence of chronic pain and many other neurological conditions among women. For CRPS it is 4 to 1 compared to men. Another neurological disorder which is in most cases TMS - dystonia - has a disproportionally high prevalence in Jewish Ashkenazi women, not just any Jewish women - go figure! I am not going to trivialize it by blaming it on purely socioeconomic factors and higher adversity that women face, because Parkinson's, for example, happens more often in men. Is there a biological, genetic link? What else is there?
5. Knowledge is cure, self-awareness is so necessary for healing to occur.
a) The infamous "it is in your head" stopped so many from healing sooner, or even healing at all:
"I preferred a terminal diagnosis that gave me a feeling of dignity, and people can look at you and go, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, I can now give you my support,’ instead of ‘That’s really weird.’”
b) the woman's initial diagnosis was correct, she was diagnosed with a psychosomatic disorder, "but she couldn’t see how it was connected with her migraines, fatigue, or tremors." As a result, she did not get the right treatment for years, and her condition got much worse.
6. The discussion on the subject of hardware (physical) and software (mental) in the body. Guess what, they cannot be separated, there is no software without hardware and vice versa. As a technology professional I can assure you with 100% certainty, that the only hardware without software in modern computers is the metal cover. Nothing works in your computer without chips. Every chip in your computer is useless and dead without software that is wired into it. It is exactly the same for the mindbody, one does not work well without the other, or does not work at all. The sooner our medicine stops treating mental health separately from physical health, the sooner it will be able to treat chronic conditions.
6. I loved the brilliant takedown of the mainstream medicine :
"And it’s no coincidence that Eliot Slater, the mid-century neurologist who fiercely denounced the concept of hysteria, was also one of history’s most enthusiastic defenders of lobotomies."
“I began to look into the current landscape, and it turned out there was very little that was understood about functional disorders at all,” he told me. “Very little in textbooks, very little teaching. There was virtually no research going on. No one had much interest.”
In short, she gives many examples of how any psychologically informed methods were outlawed despite showing good results in the clinical trials, how the phony drug-based medicine prevailed in treating anxiety and depression, along with chronic fatigue, despite not being much better than placebo.
I am so infuriated by the still widespread conviction among general public and even doctors that mental disorders are not real illness because they are "in your head", and that any illness is not a real illness unless you can sledgehammer it with a pill. I am so happy to see articles like this one, getting into the mainstream press and planting the seeds of the change in our healthcare system.
