Immune Systems Advisor

Mother Jones -  When Owen came down with Covid-19 in April 2021, he felt lucky to get away with a mild case. After a few days of a runny nose, he returned to his regular routine, including long sessions at the gym. But three weeks later, Owen, who was 25 at the time and working as an art director in Manhattan, began to have trouble breathing. It got so bad one day that he collapsed in his kitchen. Later, at the emergency room, doctors searched for a cause but could find none, so they sent him home. That was only the beginning of Owen’s ordeal. In the weeks that followed, he was so exhausted that he couldn’t get out of bed. He tried to work, but his thinking was fuzzy. His appetite was low, and he had trouble digesting even the smallest snacks. Doctors ran heart tests, ultrasounds, and blood counts that turned up nothing. Owen, who requested that I use only his first name to protect his privacy, visited several clinics for long-haul Covid patients. He got vaccinated. He went through...

IncellDx, a company that's marketing a diagnostic and treatment plan for long COVID, says it's not at all associated with the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) after being listed on the organization's website.    Both IncellDx and the FLCCC have received criticism for promoting long COVID protocols absent substantial evidence for any treatments.  MedPage Today  previously reported  that doctors treating patients at hospital-based centers for post-COVID care have raised concerns about potential dangers of the FLCCC's "I-RECOVER" protocol, which, at the time, referenced being developed in collaboration with physicians associated with IncellDx and the company itself. However, IncellDx subsequently  sent a cease-and-desist letter  to the FLCCC, demanding the group remove any reference to IncellDx and physicians associated with the company from the FLCCC site. "We have no partnership and no association with any other...

A full two years into the coronavirus pandemic,  long-haul Covid patients   remain sick and in desperate search of answers. They've lost jobs. They've lost their sense of self. Many say they have lost faith in the medical community. Despite multiple studies, the launch of dozens of specialized long Covid clinics and  $1.15 billion in federal funding  for the National Institutes of Health to study the condition, there remains a dearth of proven treatments for people who are suffering from lingering illness after their infection.  "There is no one right answer for many of our patients," said Dr. Ben Abramoff, director of the Post-COVID Assessment and Recovery Clinic at Penn Medicine, which has seen more than 1,100 long Covid patients. Compounding the problem is a lack of consensus on how to define long Covid, according to a commentary published Tuesday in the  Annals of Internal Medicine  from researchers at UCLA Health and the David Geffen School of Med...