Long covid and hunting zebras

A rumination on diagnosis

Within the world of clinical medicine are a lot of patients who feel lousy and have normal blood tests. Fibromyalgia is a classic example.

The clinician has many possible responses, but they frequently break down into:

1. need to keep looking for the right test

2. the patient is “just depressed/anxious” and is basically delusional

There is also a third position,

3. there is a real illness here, and testing is not going to find it

My readings into spike protein myocarditis, whether caused by covid-19 virus or mRNA vaccines, have led me to the hypothesis that this condition may be one potential cause of “long covid.”

If you are a fan of Alex Berenson, as I am, you may read what he has to say about long covid and conclude, as he does, that the patients are “just depressed/anxious/delusional.” Or you may be a fan of Pierre Kory, as I am, and read that he thinks Long Covid is the real deal, and reflects ongoing toxicity from spike protein.

It is possible that both Berenson and Kory are right, some of the time, and for some patients. The trick is sorting out who is “just depressed/anxious/delusional.” Not always that easy to do, in my experience.

A contribution to the debate is to propose that one strain of Long Covid, or Long Vaccine, may be chronic myocarditis.

The problem with myocarditis is that the best test is a cardiac biopsy. Dangerous and hard to obtain. The next best test is cardiac MRI. Safe and hard to obtain.

In medicine, there is a proverb “when you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras.” The idea is to look for common illnesses, not rare ones.

The problem is that rare illnesses are still out there, and patients with rare illnesses may get dismissed out of hand if the usual tests are normal.

Which leads us to prion disease, particularly as Alex Berenson has further opened the Overton Window on that one — but that is for another post.