Long-haulers are redefining Covid-19

‘The physical toll of long COVID almost always comes with an equally debilitating comorbidity of disbelief. Employers have told long-haulers that they couldn’t possibly be sick for that long. Friends and family members accused them of being lazy. Doctors refused to believe they had COVID-19. “Every specialist I saw—cardiologist, rheumatologist, dermatologist, neurologist—was wedded to this idea that ‘mild’ COVID-19 infections last two weeks,” says Angela Meriquez Vázquez, a children’s activist in Los Angeles. “In one of my first ER visits, I was referred for a psychiatric evaluation, even though my symptoms were of heart attack and stroke.”

Read here (The Atlantic, August 19, 2020)

Unsung heroines: Who cares for the carers?

Even before Covid-19, the world was facing a care crisis. The plight of often neglected, under-appreciated, under-protected and poorly equipped ‘frontline’ health personnel working to contain the pandemic has drawn attention to the tip of the care crisis iceberg. Oxfam’s annual early 2020 Davos report, Time to Care, estimates that 2.3 billion people will need care by 2030, 200 million more than in 2015, including 100 million more older people and an additional 100 million children aged 6 to 14 years.

Read here (IPS News, June 11, 2020)

Invest in the overlooked and unsung: Build sustainable people-centred long-term care in the wake of COVID-19

‘This pandemic has shone a spotlight on the overlooked and undervalued corners of our society. Across the European Region, long-term care has often been notoriously neglected. But it should not be this way. Looking to the future, transitioning to a new normal, we have a clear investment case for setting up integrated, person-centred long-term care systems in each country.

‘We have inherited the European rights, values and opportunities that define us from the generations that came before – so we must care for them. It is our duty to leave no-one behind. We must step up. So what must we do? (1) Empower care workers (2) Change how long-term care facilities operate and (3) Build systems that prioritise people’s needs.’

This is a press statement by Dr Hans Henri P Kluge, WHO Regional Director for Europe.

Read here (WHO, April 23, 2020)

Caregiving and the soul of medicine: Discussion among Eric J Topol, Abraham Verghese and Arthur M Kleinman

Kleinman: ‘It's surprising that I learned this from my personal experience; I should have known it from my professional experience—but care does not end with the death of the person you're caring for. You're caring for memories after that. A clinician also cares for memories, remembering how to think about the care and how to perhaps use a particular case to improve care in the future. The family member, of course, is rebuilding a story about one's life and one's family. Central to that is the memory of the care you gave and what you've gone through. The attention to those memories, their ordering, the time we spend developing them becomes a very important part of our lives after the practical acts of care no longer need be given because the person has passed. Those are the kinds of things I was concerned with.

‘I came to realize two things: First, that care was disappearing from clinical medicine, that clinicians have become so tied up with technologies, and so tied up with delivering the technologies effectively, that they are forgetting about the role that care plays. And second, there's some question as to whether in the future, even in families, we'll have care, given the limited time that family members have today, the fact that both husbands and wives work—this was women's work in the past—and men in our time, no matter how "woke" and liberated they claim to be, are not picking up the task of care.’

Eric J. Topol, MD, is one of the top 10 most cited researchers in medicine and frequently writes about technology in healthcare, including in his latest book, Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again.

Abraham Verghese, MD, is a critically acclaimed best-selling author and a physician with an international reputation for his focus on healing in an era when technology often overwhelms the human side of medicine.

Arthur M. Kleinman, MD, MA, is a founder of the field of medical anthropology. He has written over 40 books, including The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. His latest book is The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor.

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/920514#vp_3

View video and read transcript here (Medscape, Nov 19, 2019)