An epidemic failure to recognize real health problems
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic feels mostly over for a lot of people, especially for those who caught the virus and recovered without suffering any serious consequences. But an increasing number of studies show that “long COVID” — a range of conditions that can last for weeks, months, years (or indefinitely) after developing COVID-19 — is a real phenomenon affecting millions of people who had the disease, whether they were vaccinated or not. As many as 1 in 13 adults in the United States who developed COVID-19, even those with mild symptoms, suffer from ongoing heart palpitations, dizziness, brain fog, shortness of breath, reduced ability to taste and smell and cognitive impairment, according to the CDC. Some suffer from one or two of these symptoms or several, and with varying degrees of severity. In debilitating cases, some people have adjusted their work schedules, taken time off work or quit their jobs, which is perhaps an overlooked factor in the “great resignation.”
But people who suffer from long COVID also tend to not talk about it very often or even seek care to treat it because it isn’t widely recognized. This still includes many medical professionals, especially those already inclined to diagnose patients with “anxiety” or other fallback diagnoses when the real cause of suffering isn’t immediately obvious. Some people even still argue that long COVID isn’t a real condition, and is instead a result of poor health choices or underlying conditions that predated a person’s illness. But long COVID has been shown to affect the old as well as the young, the infirm as well as the strong — from people who are overweight to endurance athletes. All of which is to say that “long COVID” carries with it a certain stigma, even at this early stage.
For the many millions of Americans who suffer from addiction, this epidemic failure to recognize real, documented health problems is all-too-familiar. This is the subject of one of Geoffrey Plant’s stories this week; he spoke with local experts about the yearslong efforts to introduce facilities to treat substance abuse in Taos County, which, even for a state with a high rate of substance abuse compared to national averages, is home to a high proportion of people who have been or could be diagnosed with substance use disorders.
Not unlike how some people develop COVID-19 and become COVID “long haulers,” while others do not, some people who come into contact with alcohol or drugs can dip in and out of use freely and recreationally, while others are predisposed to developing dependency for reasons often beyond their own control. While a deliberate decision to abuse drugs or alcohol is a major factor in developing a substance use disorder, as this behavior causes changes in the brain, so are genetics, according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse: “As much as half of a person’s risk of becoming addicted to nicotine, alcohol, or other drugs depends on his or her genetic makeup,” the NIDA notes.
The American Society of Addiction Medicine has long defined addiction as “a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry,” and while defining addiction as a “disease” has been a polarizing claim in the science community for just as long, getting bogged down in what sort of disorder addiction is precisely is to miss the basic fact that it is one.
People all around us suffer from all variety of physical and behavioral health conditions that we may not suffer from ourselves or have the capacity to understand, but that lack of experience or understanding shouldn’t be prerequisites to our compassion or our collective efforts to acquire the appropriate resources to treat those conditions effectively.