Originally published at: Scientists want to treat Long Covid by zapping the brain with electricity | Boing Boing
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I’m very glad to see people looking into new treatments, because post-viral-syndromes in general are poorly understood, and people with them often have a very hard time getting help, or being believed at all.
That said, I would also note that according to this recent French study of ~36k people, having long covid symptoms is strongly correlated with believing you had covid, but not (other than anosmia) with having actually had covid according to a serology test. In other words, it is not clear that the long covid symptoms (which are real, and cause real suffering, and deserve attention and help) are actually primarily related to the pandemic, except in terms of the attention we’re giving them.
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If your brain is dead, you won’t have to worry about Covid, or much else.
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Long Covid is also a big worry I carry, along with any damage to my lungs, since diving is my #1 favorite thing. I’m feeling hopeful due to early reports of Omicron not being as lung-centric, but need more info on how long covid is faring in the new variant.
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ECT is still used today and is not anything like it was when Lou Reed had it.
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Thank you. ECT is an evidence based therapy that can greatly reduce the symptoms of depression. Promoting outdated and purposely misleading depictions of the procedure is pretty irresponsible and could discourage someone from receiving what could very well be a life saving therapy.
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As Spectrum reports
But of course it’s from the IEEE! Everything can be solved with electricity!
(Dues paying member here)
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There are probably other treatments that are better that we haven’t figured out yet (therapeutic use of psylocibin seems promising, for example, if we can get over ourselves as a society), but ECT is not what it once was, and I’ve seen it help people really struggling.
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Do you want a bunch of electricity based super heroes/villains? Because that is how you get a bunch of electricity based super heroes/villains
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Micro-clots. Didn’t they just find out that Long Covid is due to micro-clots? Millions (billions?) of micro-clots. At least that’s the latest theory.
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Comparing neurostimulation/neuromodulation with ECT is very much like comparing taking a shower and getting sprayed with a fire hose. Yes, same modality, but parameters and intensity if very different. And, as noted, modern ECT is different from past practices.
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Worth noting the PubPeer page surrounding that paper, for those of you who don’t keep such a plugin around to professionally check the reliability of citations.
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Long COVID seems most similar to the symptoms experienced by Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS). Not making that link and treating “Long COVID” as a purely novel observation, rather than a new variant of the sorts of dys-autonomia / post-viral fatigue isn’t particularly informative.
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As Mindysan and others have noted: Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) is a real, scientifically proven therapy that’s greatly improved over the years, but suffers from a substantial stigma.
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It’s like people heard “kill your sons” and never got over it.
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If this proves to be beneficial, I wonder if the therapy will evolve to something more like a pacemaker with tiny electrical impulses applied to precise area(s) of the brain.
The tech already exists to treat Parkinson’s and some chronic pain conditions.
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