Tomorrow is #LongCovidAwarenessDay
If you have colleagues, friends or family who’re not informed about #LongCovid talk to them about it. Tell them it’s real & it can be a life-changer even for young people. Tell them to be understanding & supportive of those who live with it.
Tell them it could’ve been you or them & that we still don’t know why some people get it & some don’t after covid. Tell them that it’s not ‘in their heads’. It’s not created by anxiety. It’s not ‘an excuse that lazy people use to skive’. Dispel harmful & stigmatising narratives.
And please also tell them not to mix up their desire to move on & forget all about the pandemic with dismissal of those whose lives changed because of the virus.
It’s 15 March #LongCovidAwareness Day.
It exists.
It’s real.
It’s disabling to many.
It can affect anyone regardless of their previous health.
It needs more research.
It need equitable clinical pathways.
It needs employment fairness.
It needs destigmatising.
Give your support.
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@TheLancet@Daltmann10@gezmedinger 2/ "I especially liked the way the authors separated their sections, with Altmann's contributions contained inside boxes and Medinger's outside them. The reader is warned at the outset that Altmann and Medinger do not always agree. This approach is a great model of co-authorship"
3/ "...and perhaps one that holds lessons for writing scientific journal articles too. Sometimes coauthors spend considerable time trying to reach a compromise on sentences or sections of a manuscript, when the reader might benefit from knowing our different perspectives."
We get told we give up or quit because of imposter syndrome. If only we have enough confidence & self belief. We get told it’s our fault. An internal malfunction. Too much sensitivity & self doubt. The longer I experience & see the more I realise how nonsense such narratives are.
If the outside world keeps chipping away at your confidence & self belief all your life of course they’ll get hit. Of course you’ll run out of energy to constantly build them up. You start realising I’m not gonna live forever so I’ll use this energy elsewhere to make me happy.
The inside work of ‘resilience’ expected of women in leadership just to counteract all the misogyny they face is phenomenal. That’s on top of the day job. But hey, resilience more & more means to me putting my energy where it’s deserved & where I please not where society demands.
It reminded me of a more senior male doctor who used to repeatedly stand behind me when I was sitting at the desk writing in patients' notes & stroke my hair. It was so distressing but you wouldn't dream of doing anything about it at the time- no one would take you seriously.
That was over 20 years ago & this is the first time I talked about it...
As a junior doctor I worked with a consultant who sat me down once & said it’s not your fault that u often doubt your skills & judgement. It’s the schooling system. You see these super confident young docs & they’r not necessarily better they were just trained for years to be so.
That was over 20 yrs ago but still resonates. I was not only blaming & shaming myself for not being good enough but also blaming myself for thinking &sometimes showing that. With one affirmative sentence he changed the second bit. He halved the psychological load. Amazing really!
That is the power of #mentoring. Sometimes it’s once sentence coming from someone you look up to, respect and trust.
1/ Quick thoughts on this recently published healthcare records #LongCovid study which concluded that mild disease does not lead to serious or chronic long term morbidity in the vast majority of patients.
TL;DR I don't believe this conclusion! Here's why: bmj.com/content/380/bm…
2/ Study results themselves say otherwise:
Shortness of breath, weakness, smell & taste disorders, concentration & memory impairment all remained higher in those with +PCR compared to controls at 1y. It seems the authors considered these not serious to reach the above conclusion
3/ Re comparison: some of those labelled uninfected im control group might have been infected at some point but not tested + or conducted tests other than PCR given the high community prevalence of covid. This may result in diluted effect differences between cases & controls.
This made me reflect on my personal definition of racism so here goes 🧵
2/ To me personally I think of #racism as discrimination whether *by thought and/or action* based on skin colour or geographical place or culture or religion or language or social attitudes that never operates in isolation, which brings us to the concept of #intersectionality