As a neurologist, who has recently specialised in Long Covid. I’d say 95% of studies in the field are untrustworthy.
As with any health condition where the biological factors are unknown, a group of psychiatrists and psychologists, the same that targeted autoimmune diseases before they were proven to be “real”, have flooded the field claiming patients are suffering from hysteria or psychological issues.
None of their studies manage to prove anything whatsoever. They have published thousands of studies which go something along the line of:
“People with long covid have more mental health issues, therefore, long covid is not real, but caused by hysteria”.
This proves no correlation whatsoever though. Every single chronic illness / disability has higher rates of mental health issues, yeah turns out being poor and marginalised + loosing a lot of what you had in life + chronic pain is not good for your mental health. In fact studies have found that before the covid infection these people have the same rate of mental illness as the normal population.
This is just one example, but legitimately > 90% of psychiatry / psychology studies I read in my field are extremely poorly done to the point of being worthless or even harmful.
There’s also a problem in that genuine biological studies get reported on really poorly by the mainstream media. I co-authored a paper showing that in 3 tests of cognitive function, spread over three days, people with long covid did not preform worse than the general population. However, if you made them do these three tests in a row, people with long covid would preform markedly worse than healthy controls, so they have a problem with cognitive endurance.
A handful of news outlets reported on this, and oftenso the news articles did not include the second part of the study, just saying “people with long covid do not have cognitive dysfunction” or “brain fog debunked”. There’s really a push from the right to delegitimise long covid and it is hurting scientific integrity hard.
Science reporting is a major related problem for sure. Science “journalism” is often barely more than reporting on a sentence in the abstract and then putting opinions about what that means. They report on single studies that show tiny effect sizes, and then use that to say things like “people who eat potatoes are better at pickleball” and often ignore statistical significance and effect size. Then they’ll do the same thing with a study that says the opposite, and we wonder why people don’t understand or trust science.
As a neurologist, who has recently specialised in Long Covid. I’d say 95% of studies in the field are untrustworthy.
As with any health condition where the biological factors are unknown, a group of psychiatrists and psychologists, the same that targeted autoimmune diseases before they were proven to be “real”, have flooded the field claiming patients are suffering from hysteria or psychological issues.
None of their studies manage to prove anything whatsoever. They have published thousands of studies which go something along the line of: “People with long covid have more mental health issues, therefore, long covid is not real, but caused by hysteria”.
This proves no correlation whatsoever though. Every single chronic illness / disability has higher rates of mental health issues, yeah turns out being poor and marginalised + loosing a lot of what you had in life + chronic pain is not good for your mental health. In fact studies have found that before the covid infection these people have the same rate of mental illness as the normal population.
This is just one example, but legitimately > 90% of psychiatry / psychology studies I read in my field are extremely poorly done to the point of being worthless or even harmful.
There’s also a problem in that genuine biological studies get reported on really poorly by the mainstream media. I co-authored a paper showing that in 3 tests of cognitive function, spread over three days, people with long covid did not preform worse than the general population. However, if you made them do these three tests in a row, people with long covid would preform markedly worse than healthy controls, so they have a problem with cognitive endurance.
A handful of news outlets reported on this, and oftenso the news articles did not include the second part of the study, just saying “people with long covid do not have cognitive dysfunction” or “brain fog debunked”. There’s really a push from the right to delegitimise long covid and it is hurting scientific integrity hard.
Science reporting is a major related problem for sure. Science “journalism” is often barely more than reporting on a sentence in the abstract and then putting opinions about what that means. They report on single studies that show tiny effect sizes, and then use that to say things like “people who eat potatoes are better at pickleball” and often ignore statistical significance and effect size. Then they’ll do the same thing with a study that says the opposite, and we wonder why people don’t understand or trust science.