The following study was performed in the United Kingdom. United States statistics are in alignment with these numbers. Long COVID actually is considered a chronic inflammatory disease process and is within the umbrella of SCI, Systemic Chronic Inflammation. From a western medical perspective, SCI is nearly impossible to treat without creating more problems for a patient. Specialists in western medicine agree that their medical model doesn't have much to offer patients with long COVID symptoms other than anti-biotic and steroid therapies, both of which have even more severe side effects.
Fortunately, Chinese herbal medicine has been shown to radically reduce the severity and duration of long COVID, offering much-needed hope for the thousands of patients suffering from this condition. Since every patient presents with their own unique set of SCI symptoms, at the Meridian Harmonics Clinic we design specifically customized treatments for each patient that addresses the whole body and all its organ systems.
by DR. DANIEL WEBER (originally published in Acupuncture Today, April 12, 2022)
A multi-center study suggests that fewer than 30% of patients hospitalized with acute COVID had fully recovered a year later. It's a stark statistic – yet this study did not account for the significant number of us who were never admitted to hospital, and have still not fully recovered. The most recent UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) data from October reports that:
1.2 million people are living with long COVID (in hospitalized and non-hospitalized patients); 36% of those have had it for more than a year, with the greatest prevalence in health and social care workers, and people living in more deprived areas.
Of people with self-reported long COVID:
232,000 (19%) first had (or suspected they had) COVID-19 less than 12 weeks previously;
862,000 people (71%) first had (or suspected they had) COVID-19 at least 12 weeks previously
439,000 (36%) first had (or suspected they had) COVID-19 at least one year previously.
The proportion of people with self-reported long COVID who reported that it reduced their ability to carry out daily activities remained stable compared with previous months:
symptoms adversely affected the day-to-day activities of 775,000 people (64% of those with self-reported long COVID),
232,000 (19%) reported that their ability to undertake their day-to-day activities had been "limited a lot"
Chronic fatigue continued to be the most common symptom reported as part of individuals' experience of long COVID (54% of those with self-reported long COVID), followed by shortness of breath (36%), loss of smell (35%), and difficulty concentrating (28%).
Other symptoms are seen in long COVID individuals: peripheral neuropathy, severe brain fog, skin rashes, anxiety, headaches and migraines, insomnia, malaise, infertility, and fibromyalgia. Individuals having had COVID do not have to have had a severe case. Simply having been infected with the virus can elicit long COVID.
Long COVID is a complicated, multi-system disease, whose pathological processes have yet to be fully understood, making treatment difficult. This is further compounded by the diverse range of symptoms, so there is no "one size fits all" treatment. Health professionals have been extrapolating treatment strategies from other diseases, but management is not consistent between clinics. A current study aims to address this lack of standardization by producing a "gold standard" for care, and a recently updated guidance to include individualized treatment plans for those with long Covid.
Long COVID isn't going away soon. Post-viral syndromes are not new, but we have never seen anything on such a scale.
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