When Guidelines Don’t Exist, Long COVID Treatment is Still Possible
Long COVID is not only a complex and urgent condition affecting millions, it is a disease that still has no well-established medical guidelines for care. How do patients and providers chart a treatment path without evidence-based protocols? In the latest episode of Long Covid, MD, I shared key insights from a recent talk I gave as […]
New Year, New Resolve: Lessons in Finding and Receiving Help
Happy New Year from Long Covid, MD! Today’s episode focuses on a powerful New Year’s resolution inspired by Mister Rogers: Look for the helpers. For those of us navigating Long COVID or other chronic conditions, this simple advice is actually quite profound – and as you may already know, it’s not easy. In the first podcast […]
Dysautonomia Connects Many Long COVID Symptoms
When I first fell ill with Long COVID, and before I understood dysautonomia, I was confused as to why I had so many seemingly unrelated symptoms. Because our healthcare system is divided by organ systems, I made appointments with many different specialists to talk about each symptom. I found a cardiologist for my racing heart, […]
Getting Better Sleep
Sleep issues are pervasive in Long COVID, often taking the form of insomnia, restless nights, or unrefreshing sleep. In the latest episode of Long Covid MD, I had the privilege of speaking with Stanford psychologist Dr. Hylton Molzof, who specializes in behavioral sleep medicine. We explore the biologic and emotional influences on sleep, and the ways Cognitive Behavioral Therapy […]
A Doctor-Patient-Approved Long COVID Gift Guide
Happy Holidays. I recently joined my friend Katherine Marie on her podcast “Long COVID Real Talk” to discuss ways to survive the holiday season. As I shared with her, we celebrate Christmas-lite in our household of four. Gifts tend to be fun trinkets that our kids have come to expect: a holiday-themed Pez dispenser, a pair of […]
Long COVID Rundown: Pacing and The Push-Crash Cycle
The spookiest thing about October has been the fact that I did a lot, without severe fallout. I undertook some big, tedious tasks, and some fun ones, too. Although I did suffer some episodes of post-exertional malaise, they were shorter and less severe than I’ve experienced in the past. Why? I think it’s due to […]
The Medicine Cabinet: Low-Dose Naltrexone for Long COVID
The most popular episode of my Long Covid, MD podcast is Episode 19: Low-Dose Naltrexone for Long COVID. In under 30 minutes, I explain how low-dose naltrexone works and why it’s commonly prescribed to treat Long COVID symptoms. Low-dose naltrexone, often abbreviated LDN, has been found to help fatigue, brain fog and pain in people with Long COVID. […]
The Medicine Cabinet: Metformin
I have bottles stashed throughout my room. Not bottles of drink. Bottles of pills. Inhalers and nasal sprays, too. Prescriptions, supplements, powders, tinctures. My medicine cabinet is full, so are two shelves under my bathroom sink. Shoe boxes are used as storage containers for medications I don’t use every day. Those are stored in the […]
Long COVID Drains Energy and Relationships
Long COVID impacts relationships. When my husband and I had our first child, our relationship strained. The new stressor highlighted all the dysfunctional parts of our relationship that we had been ignoring. It was like we had been using bandaids to stop leaks in a dam, and after kids the dam broke. We’re still together […]
How To Help Children with Long COVID
Dr. Melanie Hoppers never intended to become an expert in post-viral illness. As a physician trained in both internal medicine and pediatrics, she had spent years in primary and urgent care before her own daughter developed myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) following a bout of mononucleosis. Frustrated by the lack of medical knowledge and treatment options, […]