Dr. Aaron Hartman says only a third of primary care doctors feel capable of diagnosing long COVID, even though 10-30% of people who had COVID develop persistent symptoms like brain fog, fatigue, and severe dysautonomia. Many patients end up disabled by these lingering effects.
Chapters
Only about a third of primary care doctors in our country currently feel capable of diagnosing, treating, or at least diagnosing this entity, maybe not treating, just diagnosing. And about 10 to 30% of COVID people who've had COVID in our country are actually dealing with this. That probably gives it away, doesn't it? I'm talking about long COVID or post-acute sequelae of COVID-19. This is people who've had COVID and have residual inflammation, immune dysregulation, I don't want to get on the scientific nuances of it, but the basic gist is your immune system gets jacked up, gets pro-inflammatory. Instead of calming down and going back to baseline, it actually keeps a certain level of inflammation that can look like brain fog, fatigue, gut issues, joint aches and pains. Some people actually develop significant POTS or dysautonomia where they actually are unable to stand. And we have some patients in our clinic who actually have been disabled from their long COVID. So, how common is this? Well, 10%. I've read somewhere up to 30%, but I'm sticking with the 10% number of people who have who had COVID will get this. So, we're talking about millions of people with this. And, it's called the second wave, which means people who got this who are now having symptoms and continue to get symptoms. So, what can you do if you had COVID, which is pretty much all of us, 89% of us at this stage? What can you do? First, you can become educated. We have a bunch of blogs on this talking about long COVID going back to actually 2020. My very first video actually on the virus was actually January of 2020 before we knew what to call it. So, we've been talking about this for a long time. We've also done some podcasts on this. We have a lot of resources on our website. But the point is you need to become educated because this is something that all of us are going to know someone who's going to deal with or maybe deal with it ourselves. Unfortunately, when I got COVID and I got my horrible anxiety and my chest pain that lasted for like 6 weeks, I knew what to do to get it to go away. Unfortunately, a lot of patients and a lot of individuals who had this then, and they're suffering with stuff now. So, I'd love to hear if you're someone who actually figured something out that actually worked great for you, please share below and wherever you're following us. And, if you have a story that's just crazy how the system overlooked you, I'd love to hear about that as well. This is how we all kind of get on board. We can actually lift each other up, educate each other, but also at the same time get this medical ball forward. We need to stop medical gaslighting, being medically gaslit by the system, and uncover these blind spots so we can all heal and get healthier together.
