Please think before you write, this is extremely offensive.

I didn't say all or even a majority were exaggerating symptoms, I simply said that many were. Part of my justification was a number of studies which have found psychological distress over catching COVID as a strong predictor of long Covid:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9825049/

That isn't necessarily evidence of psychosomatic cause.

I have a genetic disorder that was diagnosed late in life but I knew well before I had a proper diagnosis that I had frail health. I'm cautious and worry about things that others don't worry about because history proves it's a real problem for me, more than average.

Thank you for your concern. When I was 17, I developed acute neuropathy after covid which was diagnosed via a biopsy. It manifested as orthostatic intolerance caused by insufficient blood flow to my brain. I have been bedridden for around two years now. I was certainly distressed when I got COVID, largely because of a burning pain emanating from my extremities. My uncle died from autoimmune scleroderma. He also developed Lymphoma, whose pathology we believe began with Epstein-Barr.

The prevailing hypothesis is a cross reactive species of auto antibodies to the Angiotensin II Type 1 receptor. I unfortunately have not been able to receive a test for this antibody; however, I did test positive for Alpha and Beta adrenergic autoantibodies along with Muscarinic M2 and M4 autoantibodies targeting the hippocampus of my brain. I managed a borderline positive titer for anti TSHDS antibodies, which are correlated with small fiber neuropathy.

Normally, I do not comment, and I specifically made an account to type this message while holding a laptop over my head, a difficult task as you can imagine. The medical community is moving too slow in response to post Covid syndromes. I and all the other people affected with neurologic complications would be most appreciative if you all helped review literature on the immune system. It is an awful lot like debugging code! Right now, I read a section about Janus Kinase and TNF alpha. I believe a medication like baracitinib would do a wonderful job mediating mthe inflammatory response. ICU covid patients typically died from TNF alpha, Interleukin 6, and Cysteinyl Leukotriene 1 mediated by 5 lipoxygenase synthesis from arachidonic acid. All of these biomarkers are elevated in long covid patients. Lastly, covid can actually cause a reactivation of Epstein-Barr and HSV1. Telemisartan is an Angiotensin receptor blocker that can downregulate ACE2 levels in the body and demonstrates a prophylactic effect against covid.

If you read this far, I am deeply appreciative. More so than monetary donations, I would be grateful if could spread the message about this disorder.

I dunno, the most people I know with psychological distress over catching covid are people who would be greatest at risk of long covid. People with a history of weak hearts or lungs, athsmatics, people who have existing post-viral infection type diseases, people who are too poor to afford to take off work...

Some has families that have suffered under people who faked.

I cannot say the ratio, but I am sure I have seen with my own eyes how it drains parents and siblings.

Be very careful in judging if someone is faking CFS. You often only see someone when they are on a (social induced) high. Not when the crash comes 24h or even days later. The added suffering from not having a support network, or worse being accused of faking is just unreal.

It was not only this.

It was more what looks to me like psychopathic tendencies:

Eventually she was caught in all kinds of lies, because she lied so much about so many other things as well that once her sisters started talking with each others they realized it quickly.

As far as I understand she had been telling different stories to each of them and to her parents.

It's not a offensive to portray objective reality. People can and often do overreact and fake symptoms. This is just how it is. Why would that offend anyone?

The alternative to this is burying your head in the sand and saying we should take everyone at their word. This would result in a WORSE outcome for people that actually have the issues you're so worried about because the data would be skewed.

Maybe you ought to do the thinking, instead of emotionally reacting?

Let's do some thinking: collectively, we don't know enough about CFS or the human brain to make definitive statements like 'a large number are faking it.' You've confused your emotions for logic.

... while accusing others of confusing their emotions for logic.

Explain. Are you trying to make an objectively false statement that there's not one person on Earth faking a disease like CFS?

You do realize there's an actual mental disorder where people fake being sick right?

The only person confused here seems to be you.

Yes please do some thinking. There's a condition called Factitious disorder and then there's also anxiety based hypochondria bud.

You're making an objectively FALSE statement. There is ZERO possibility that there's no person in the world faking CFS.

Thanks for the laugh. It's hilarious that you tried to accuse me of an emotional argument.

You can drop the strawman bullshit as well. I never gave a number on how many people are faking it or just being hypochondriacs.

Nowhere does my comment state that no one is faking. You've simply left reality in favor of a fantasy.

This is what I said:

> collectively, we don't know enough about CFS or the human brain to make definitive statements like 'a large number are faking it.'

This is what it means:

We don't know enough to quantify the ratio of fakers.

'A large number are faking it' is a type of quantification: a ratio. In this case, a descriptive ratio that uses the words "large number" instead of literal numbers.

Depression may not be psychosomatic. It may be somatopsychic.

Some physical ailments have psychological and emotional side effects. Depression may be rooted in physical ailments negatively impacting mood and brain function.

It could easily be both, though there certainly is research indicating depression causes physical pain. However since many of these studies only found correlations it's only clear that they come together and not whether one causes the other. One way of isolating that issue would be to determine the rates of depression in people with unambiguously diagnosable chronic pain disorders due to a root physical cause vs both the population and the population of those who report chronic pain.

Chronic pain definitely negatively impacts mood.

Except for phantom pain, I think it's generally best to assume pain has a physical cause and pain negatively impacts mood, not the other way around.

And I've had phantom pain. I think even there, it's likely a physical cause, but mirror therapy is still known to help for some cases.

I don't even understand the distinction you are trying to make. Your mind is part of your physical body. If you are depressed then it is constitutively a physical ailment.

Are people just this bought into mind-body dualism like two centuries later?

Depression is physical ailment but it can have either an external cause (a death, loss of job) and an internal/physical ailment (a virus or other pathogen) which causes depression.

It's the difference between a woman with a worm in her head experiencing depression and brain fog (because, y'know, a parasitic worm was in her head) and claiming her depression had caused a parastic worm to appear in her head

Hehe, you sound like almost every doctor I’ve had… despite having at least one objective metric to show that something was wrong immediately after contracting EBV: Testosterone and Estradiol dropped by (and remained at) about 65%. Took three years of joint pain (common low estrogen side effect, what a surprise), muscle soreness/weakness, and the death of a formerly lively sex drive (2 months into a fantastic relationship — maybe I was depressed by having it too good?), etc — before I said “screw it, I’ll go to a TRT clinic”.

I’m still a far cry from my former self, but everyone around me has seen the positive difference that unfucking (at least part of) my hormones has made. But hey, maybe that’s all psychosomatic, including the swollen lymph nodes that for a year were visibly protruding out.

This is exactly why we need a biomarker.

Same as fibromyalgia, which is why women are diagnosed of CFS, post-covid and fibromyalgia twice as much as men... which is, tada... the same rates as clinical depression.

Consider watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYNMzaZk_iU

The reason folks are unhappy with your take is that many people are personally adversely affected by doctors and others ignoring their physical symptoms. It's worth looking up Stephanie Aston of New Zealand, who just died at age 33; she apparently had Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Several doctors told her she was faking her juvenile arthritis etc.

People like accusing others of faking their symptoms because it allows the accuser to avoid moral injury from doing nothing to help or even just the discomfort of witnessing the suffering of others with empathy.

Yes, it it not a good moment politically to discuss the psychological correlates/causes of disease. Probably hasn't been since the AIDS crisis, to be honest.

In future decades we will hopefully be more mature around these subjects.

It's super weird to me to claim CFS is caused by psychological issues. Imagine all the people who were whining about COVID shutdowns and isolating for 14 days or whatever, with people frothing at the mouth about how depressing and how stunted their children are for not going to school. Okay, wow, looks like CFS forces you to do all that isolating/missing school/etc, maybe that causes mental illness the way it caused that for the broader population...

> > It's worth looking up Stephanie Aston of New Zealand, who just died at age 33; she apparently had Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Several doctors told her she was faking her juvenile arthritis etc.

You don't die from EDS, unless it's the vascular type, and even then it's not the EDS but the catastrophic rupture of an artery (abdomen or aortic which has weak collagen due to EDS) that causes the death.

With a prevalence of 1 in 50,000-200,000 you can't fault the doctors for not seeing it or just branding it as very unlikely, of course the accusation of faking an illness should not be tolerated.

I had Long Covid for about six months, and it does create similar symptoms as what we know as depression and anxiety. But that's just it. Depression is not really the cause of symptoms, it IS the symptom, or the effect. CBT is not going to fix this problem if the cause is physical in nature. So you can't say "effects of depression" because depression is the effect. Sadly many medical professionals make this mistake.