After his second hospitalization for acute Covid-19, Tony Marks expected to get better. Then pain invaded the 54-year-old software executive’s arms and legs. At first, he felt like he was covered by deep bruises, although nothing was visible on his skin. These days, he told me, he feels like he’s being beaten repeatedly with a baseball bat.
Pain is increasingly being recognized as a key feature of what is commonly called long Covid, in which symptoms persist after the acute phase of the viral infection ends.
In a recent study from Italy, for example, one-third of Covid long-haulers had symptoms of fibromyalgia or widespread muscle or bone pain. Other research links Covid-19 to neuropathic pain — often described as burning, stabbing, or feeling like electrical shocks — that results from damage to the nervous system. Pain, which also includes headache, ranks among the top symptoms of long Covid in large longitudinal studies.
advertisement
Yet the medical establishment has been sluggish in acknowledging and treating the pain that people with long Covid experience.
For those of us who already live with persistent pain, delayed action is nothing new.
advertisement
One day in 1994, as a 30-year-old working in my office at the U.S. Department of Justice, my back began to burn. It felt as if acid were eating my spine. Suddenly, muscles from my feet to my neck tensed like cable wire; my whole body seized up and I fell from my chair to the floor. For many years after that, I was largely bedridden and extremely limited in my ability to sit, stand, or walk.
Related:
Could training AI to learn from patients give doctors a better understanding of the causes of pain?
It took three years of slogging through the health care system in search of a cause — nerve conduction tests suggested multiple sclerosis while bone scans indicated ankylosing spondylitis — before my disability was identified as stemming from a surgical mishap.
But for many people, the search for the source of chronic pain lasts far longer than that. Health research professor Dania Palanker, a patient advocate I work with at the National Pain Advocacy Center, waited 28 years for an accurate diagnosis that explained the pain she had suffered since childhood. Diane Talbert, another patient advocate, had her life-long pain tied to a severe form of psoriatic arthritis — 25 years after her psoriasis was discovered at age 6.
Imagine waiting a quarter century for answers — or worse, never getting them at all.</…….
Source: https://www.statnews.com/2021/12/02/long-covid-pain-not-acknowledged/
