Long COVID still has no cure — so these patients are turning to research

something like autoimmune disease or long COVID falls into the third category of illness; it combines biology and biography in ways that are difficult for most of us (whether scientists or laypeople) to conceptualize.

the COVID-19 pandemic has given us a keen sense of how variable the human response to infection can be, vividly dramatizing the ways that a virus or bacterium (or multiple viruses and bacteria) can collide with an individual’s biology to unleash a host of perplexing aftereffects in the body, often incited by the individual’s immune system. The scop

In response, doctors tried dozens of therapies. The first to gain wide attention was an anti-malarial drug called hydroxychloroquine, or HCQ.

Almost two years into the crisis, we have not just failed to find really effective new small-molecule drug treatments for Covid, we do not even know if a long list of cheap drugs that are already widely available might help.

these new diseases are stubbornly unknowable. They exist without cause, course, or cure. They are nothing more or less than their self-reported symptoms. They are metaphor as illness.

For example, physicians who have made a business treating chronic Lyme disease regularly prescribe long-term courses of antibiotics, despite a lack of evidence.