jwz: The First Epistemological Problem of Long Covid:

I'm horrified and fascinated by what's playing out in medical science around Long Covid because, well, because of a lot of things. For one thing, there's what I already, coming into this, knew about the pretty much complete failure of medicine and medical research to treat previous conditions like fibromyalgia and ME/CFS seriously, and even treat conditions like Lyme disease adequately seriously. I feel like these failures of medicine have been viewed, until the Pandemic, by the larger society as trivial edge cases. But now, now that everyone is aware that there is this hideous possibility that if you get COVID you might never get better, there's this dawning realization that post-viral conditions aren't quite so trivial or rare after all, and medical science's failure to address those conditions means we have much less information than we might like to have about this one -- and also less in the way of conceptual tools.