Severe Long COVID Is Tricky to Treat

After coming into contact with more and more post-COVID patients, I have realized that Long COVID is truly tricky and not as simple as I first imagined. Two classmates of my master's wife have lost their husbands to Long COVID one after another this year. One day my master called me and said that after two classmates' husbands caught COVID, they developed Long COVID and died unexpectedly. I felt rather heavy after hearing this.

The two elderly men were not actually very old, both in their sixties. One had pre-existing chronic disease and the other did not; both were infected with COVID last December and died of cardiogenic sudden death due to Long COVID in February or March of this year.

Two allergic patients close to me, after being infected with COVID, also had much worse allergic symptoms when they recurred than before. Perhaps because their immune systems were again affected by last year's infection, this year's allergy season brought especially severe symptoms.

Some other Long COVID patients have come to me for help. At first, thinking according to TCM pattern differentiation and treatment, I imagined Long COVID should not be hard to handle; only after practice did I learn it is not so easy. Some patients have a breached blood-brain barrier, some become depressed, some have persistent low-grade fever, some have incessant vertigo, some have tachycardia; their common feature is that they are very hard to treat.

Practice has shown that many of my past judgments about Long COVID were wrong. I am now extremely cautious with it; Long COVID is harder to treat than the symptoms that appear just after acute infection. Earlier I saw British medical experts come out saying there is currently no effective treatment for Long COVID, telling patients not to trust advertisements claiming to cure it. At the time I somewhat dismissively thought it was because British doctors did not understand TCM. Only after encountering it myself did I learn how hard Long COVID is to handle.

I will keep looking for solutions to Long COVID in my reading, but I certainly no longer dare think of it as an easy condition. My own sequelae should be of a very mild type, so recovery was not hard; mine disappeared within less than a month. But now I have met some Long COVID patients who have been unable to work normally for over half a year. So patients with severe sequelae are indeed suffering.

May this hard bone be gnawed through by all. COVID and Long COVID may persist for a long time; in any case, we still need to find ways to relieve the suffering of severe Long COVID patients and improve their quality of life.