Vice reports:

Last March, Lisa O’Brien began experiencing mild symptoms of what she thought might be COVID-19: scratchy throat, body aches, fatigue. But with no fever and just a hint of a cough, she decided to wait on a COVID test. Then new symptoms appeared, including chills and shortness of breath. After two weeks they were alarming enough for her to get tested: Negative.

But the negative result didn’t resolve her health problems. Four weeks out, O’Brien was barely able to breathe and she returned to the hospital. “I’d had anxiety before,” she told me. “But the shortness of breath was like nothing I’d ever experienced.”

Her visit followed a pattern, all too familiar to so-called COVID long haulers. “They did a bunch of tests. And at the end? The doctor asked me if I understood the power of suggestion.”

“I had no proof that I’d had COVID,” O’Brien continued. “I felt kind of crazy already, and he was validating my feeling of being crazy.”

Nearly a year later, long haulers have been featured in nearly every prominent media outlet telling stories just like Lisa’s. In November, avid marathoner Nitza Rochez broke down in tears as she recounted her experience to 60 Minutes’ Anderson Cooper. Rochez had been suffering from months of brain fog, tremors, dizziness. One day her legs collapsed and she went to the ER. All the tests came back normal.

“The doctors were like, ‘You’re fine. You’re having anxiety attacks. You’re just nervous. Breathe.’”

“They thought it was in your head,” Cooper replied to Rochez.

“They thought it was in my head. And it’s one of those moments that I’ll never forget because how can I possibly be fine? And when I left the emergency room that day, I was like, ‘I’m just going home to die.’”

Long COVID is now widely accepted by scientific experts. Post-COVID clinics exist in 39 states, many housed at flagship medical institutions. But patients continue to be treated this way. (As this article was being prepared for publication, Lisa O’Brien reached out to tell me she had been referred to a psychotherapist who suggested her symptoms might be caused by generalized anxiety disorder and stress.)

“It’s a common refrain we hear again and again, symptoms were chalked up to stress and anxiety,” said Dr. Lekshmi Santhosh, a pulmonary and critical care specialist who runs UCSF’s multidisciplinary post-COVID clinic. Santhosh’s clinic is limited to patients who were hospitalized for acute COVID. That means the people she’s treating had severe, officially documented cases, and still received psychological diagnoses of persistent symptoms. [Continue reading…]