Treating Long Covid Is Rife With Guesswork

December 3, 2022 Vera

Medical equipment is still strewn around the house of Rick Lucas, 62, nearly two years after he came home from the hospital. He picks up a spirometer, a device that measures lung capacity, and takes a deep breath — though not as deep as he’d like.

Still, Lucas has come a long way for someone who spent more than three months on a ventilator because of covid-19.

“I’m almost normal now,” he said. “I was thrilled when I could walk to the mailbox. Now we’re walking all over town.”

Dozens of major medical centers have established specialized covid clinics around the country. A crowdsourced project counted more than 400. But there’s no standard protocol for treating long covid. And experts are casting a wide net for treatments, with few ready for formal clinical trials.

It’s not clear just how many people have suffered from symptoms of long covid. Estimates vary widely from study to study — often because the definition of long covid itself varies. But the more conservative estimates still count millions of people with this condition. For some, the lingering symptoms are worse than the initial bout of covid. Others, like Lucas, were on death’s door and experienced a roller-coaster recovery, much worse than expected, even after a long hospitalization.

Symptoms vary widely. Lucas had brain fog, fatigue, and depression. He’d start getting his energy back, then go try light yardwork and end up in the hospital with pneumonia.

It wasn’t clear which ailments stemmed from being on a ventilator so long and which signaled the mysterious condition called long covid.

“I was wanting to go to work four months after I got home,” Rick said over the laughter of his wife and primary caregiver, Cinde.

“I said, ‘You know what, just get up and go. You can’t drive. You can’t walk. But go in for an interview. Let’s see how that works,’” Cinde recalled.

Cinde Lucas, whose husband has suffered from long covid, lists the many supplements and prescription medications he tried while looking for something to combat brain fog, depression, and fatigue. (Blake Farmer / WPLN News)

Rick did start working earlier this year, taking short-term assignments in his old field as a nursing home administrator. But he’s still on partial disability.

Why has Rick mostly recovered while so many haven’t shaken the symptoms, even years later?

“There is absolutely nothing anywhere that’s clear about

How many occasions a week must you work out, how long should your routines be?

May 13, 2022 Vera

[This article was originally published in 2017.]

Retaining energetic is crucial for keeping balanced, and taking into consideration 27 for each cent of Britons aren’t performing exercises at least once a week, according to a 2020 YouGov survey, you could possibly be inclined to up your action amounts.

But it is challenging to know just how significantly workout you should really be undertaking to access your health ambitions, be that weight loss or bulking up.

“The sort of workout you do finally depends on your means, targets, likes and dislikes, products available, what accidents you have, and how a lot time you have available,” own coach Tom Mans explained to The Independent.

Even though there is not a one-size-suits-all tactic, there are ideas and recommendations that you can stick to and use to your education to make sure you have a balanced, effective, safe and pleasing training regime.

How quite a few days a 7 days should really you prepare?

Unless you are a health and fitness enthusiast, you possibly want to expend as minor time in the gym as probable to reach your wellbeing and physical fitness aims. But Mans suggests education only after or two times a 7 days will not give you more than a minimal level of exercise.

“You really should prepare at the very least a few situations a week if you want to realize your wellbeing and conditioning aims in a reasonable quantity of time, and stay suit and healthier,” Mans describes.

Training four or 5 moments a week is suitable, but most men and women find that unachievable owing to time constraints, so Mans states it’s most effective to goal for three: “This exposes your human body to a big sufficient training stimulus all through the 7 days, which permits the body to adapt, get more robust, leaner and fitter.”

How long need to your exercise routines be?

Some folks argue that you can get an efficient and successful training in fifty percent an hour if you use the time properly, but Mans believes that if you want to make authentic progress, you should be doing work out for 45 minutes to an hour.

He endorses paying 10 minutes warming up and mobilising your physique, 30-40 minutes bodyweight education, and 5-10 minutes cooling down and stretching,

That said, fifty percent hour workout routines can be valuable for conditioning periods or interval

Covid declared a pandemic two a long time in the past. Overall health experts warn it truly is nevertheless not about

March 18, 2022 Vera

Clinical workers handle a coronavirus condition (COVID-19) patient in the Intense Treatment Unit (ICU) at the Providence Mission Healthcare facility in Mission Viejo, California, January 25, 2022.

Shannon Stapleton | Reuters

LONDON — With war raging involving Russia and Ukraine, the world’s battle in opposition to the coronavirus has been mainly sidelined and the next anniversary of Covid-19 currently being declared a pandemic by the World Overall health Group could very easily move us by.

Covid was, and still is, a seismic party that has impacted the lives of millions of men and women, leading to heartache for individuals that shed loved types and nervousness for hundreds of thousands of persons who lost livelihoods as the pandemic brought about prevalent lockdowns and a massive strike to enterprises both equally large and little.

Of program, the extended-lasting influence on lots of individuals’ mental and bodily health and fitness is yet to be thoroughly calculated or appreciated, with the consequences of the virus — irrespective of whether it be the lingering Covid signs or “prolonged Covid” quite a few individuals are encountering, or its impression on the mind and overall body — still being investigated by researchers.

Two a long time ago, when the WHO declared on March 11, 2020, that Covid “could be characterised as a pandemic” tiny did we know that we would now have recorded over 452 million cases to date, and over 6 million deaths, according to facts from Johns Hopkins College, which continues to keep a tally on the amount of infections and fatalities.

The quantities are so immense it is uncomplicated to fail to remember that just about every of these fatalities has been a tragic loss for anyone, or some spouse and children.

Vaccine triumph

Though the human expense and psychological losses caused by the pandemic are incalculable, it’s well worth celebrating the achievements manufactured in the course of the pandemic with an abundance of optimism on the working day that the initial preliminary scientific trial final results emerged, on Nov. 9 2020 from Pfizer, indicating that its Covid vaccine designed with German biotech BioNTech in document-breaking time, was extremely productive towards Covid.

Signaling a way out of the pandemic at last, inventory markets soared and the vaccine maker hailed the discovery as a “wonderful day for science and humanity.” The content announcement was adopted by equivalent final results from Moderna, AstraZeneca and others.

Because

New CA law takes aim at long wait times for mental health care : Shots

November 23, 2021 Vera

When Greta Christina heard that Kaiser Permanente mental health clinicians were staging a protest on Oct. 13, 2019, over long wait times for therapy, she made her own sign and showed up to support them. She’s had to wait up to six weeks between therapy appointments for her depression.

Ingrid Nelson

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Ingrid Nelson

When Greta Christina fell into a deep depression five years ago, she called up her therapist in San Francisco — someone she’d had a great connection with when she needed therapy in the past. And she was delighted to find out that he was now “in network” with her insurance company, meaning she wouldn’t have to pay out of pocket anymore to see him.

But her excitement was short-lived. Over time, Christina’s appointments with the therapist went from every two weeks, to every four weeks, to every five or six.

“To tell somebody with serious, chronic, disabling depression that they can only see their therapist every five or six weeks is like telling somebody with a broken leg that they can only see their physical therapist every five or six weeks,” she says. “It’s not enough. It’s not even close to enough.”

Then, this summer, Christina was diagnosed with breast cancer. Everything related to her cancer care — her mammogram, biopsy, surgery appointments — happened promptly, like a “well-oiled machine,” she says, while her depression care stumbled along.

“It is a hot mess,” she says. “I need to be in therapy — I have cancer! And still nothing has changed.”

A new law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in October aims to fix this problem for Californians. Senate Bill 221, which passed the state Legislature with a nearly unanimous vote, requires health insurers across the state to reduce wait times for mental health care to no more than 10 business days. Six other states have similar laws limiting wait times, including Colorado, Maryland, and Texas.

Unequal access to behavioral health care is pervasive

Long waits for mental health treatment are a nationwide problem, with reports of patients waiting an average of

What is the long run of wearable technological know-how in health care?

November 19, 2021 Vera

If you had been all-around all through the time of clip-on pedometers, you know we’ve appear a extensive way in the growth of wearable health and health equipment.

But how can wearable technologies be applied to healthcare? And how is research building wearable technologies more available?

Dr. Bijan Najafi, professor of surgical treatment and director of clinical study in the Division of Vascular Surgical procedures and Endovascular Treatment in the Michael E. DeBakey Section of Operation at Baylor University of Medicine, shares his ideas on the wearable technology landscape, exploration and a lot more in the next Q&A.

Q: How can wearable units enhance wellbeing?
A: The past 5 a long time have viewed an improve in electronic wellness wearables that can collect details in authentic time and expose the actual physical and chemical qualities of the overall body to assess wellness. Wearables are compact electronic products that, when positioned on your human body, can support evaluate temperature, blood stress, blood oxygen, respiration fee, sound, GPS area, elevation, physical movement, alterations in direction, and the electrical action of the coronary heart, muscle mass, brain, and skin.

This wealthy data can support observe calorie expenditure, workout, stress, nutritious posture, weak rest excellent, cognitive decline, and even early warning symptoms of infection and irritation. We simply cannot handle what we cannot evaluate. Wearables can empower us to consistently measure our wellbeing and wellbeing without the need of the need for visiting a clinical heart and immediately consider an action when needed.

Wearables could also warn us about modifiable possibility factors that might influence our well being and wellbeing. For illustration, in a modern research, we utilized wearables to monitor stress and slumber top quality of office workers and located that expending prolonged durations in dry, indoor air may raise your stress degree in the course of operate several hours, which in flip could lead to inadequate slumber quality and reduced physical fitness.

Q: How does wearable engineering analysis translate to scientific care?
A: Serious health ailments are fiscally and emotionally costly. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of health care companies are re-engineering their pathways to advertise “care in position.” Digital wellness wearables can help in clever triaging of patients for timely referral to outpatient or inpatient configurations for preventive treatment or well timed intervention right before the disorder gets tricky to handle. Wearables can also empower people