My colleague at #MEAction, @TillmanAdriane just quoted the new @edyong209 article: "The physical toll of long COVID almost always comes with an equally debilitating comorbidity of disbelief..." (1/7) #longhaulers #longCOVID #pwME

"...employers have told #longhaulers that they couldn’t possibly be sick for that long. Friends and family members accused them of being lazy. Doctors refused to believe they had COVID-19..." (2/7) #LongCovid

So @TillmanAdriane said "HOW DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING?" & I have an unpleasant answer: doctors downplay the seriousness of disease as a matter of course. They've been taught to as part of their training. And this decision is based on bad science & wishful thinking. (3/7)

Clinicians have been taught that worrying and feeling bad about a disease negatively impacts health. A famous meta-analysis on cancer shows that 'attitudes' have no independent effect on well-being, but the certainty remains that a good attitude is correlated to good health. (4/7

People w/chronic illness find that clinicians may downplay their concerns. Rather than perform testing, they sometimes cite the diagnosis that would cause the least worry, were it true -- sans testing. So what about CDC when they said that everyone should recover in 2 weeks? (5/7

When CDC concludes that the 'average' case of COVID-19 lasts two weeks, were they operating from good, solid data? Or did they choose the least frightening of many, potentially more likely possibilities? (6/7)

And what was the effect of that perceived certainty on friends, family, & clinicians when #longhaulers stayed ill? The minimization of patient concerns in the doctor's office leads to minimization of real suffering outside of it. There's my troublesome thought for today. (7/7)

If doctors downplay a disease in order to make us "feel better" or "minimize panic", people w/o lived experience of those diseases believe them. That minimization becomes bias as it spreads to the wider world. We must make the shift from comfort to empathetic honesty.