You don't have to pay anyone anything, just inform yourself and maybe buy some cheap vitamins, change/improve your diet, and some other free or near-free practices.
I don't get with people jump in that health care can only be had through a third party.
... Honestly? A lot. Your symptoms could get worse. You could turn a condition that's got treatable (if not currently curable) symptoms, into one with ones that aren't, or ones that are more severe, with worse treatment options.
And then the burden isn't just on you, it's on your family and friends who have to either take care of you, or watch you suffer more.
Long covid isn't nothing, clearly — but this kind of mindset is irresponsible. The "what have you got to lose" track is typically reserved only for people who have a terminal diagnosis, and even then, it's always a good idea to talk with your doctor about the pros and cons of the different experimental options you have access to.
That's quite an exaggeration. Why do you think the therapies should incur such a risk? Of course, it's on you to make sensible choices, but there are very large communities around long COVID out there, and the crowd makes a good enough job of sorting out what's legitimate and safe and what's not.
Again, I'm assuming we are talking about people in a state of abandonment by the medical establishment, some unable to function at all. I can't understand the risk calculation here.
Statistically speaking, you aren't well-equipped to make sensible medical choices. That's why we have medical professions — pharmacology, virology, internal medicine, and hundreds of others — each with people working in them with years of training and understanding.
The question is less, "will X formulation work as a remedy for long covid," and more, "what effects will X formulation have on someone with Y and Z conditions, in their late 60s, having undergone this, that, and the other medical procedures on so-and-so timelines, and still on a course of this other formulation to abate chronic symptoms as a result of complications during one of the medical procedures they underwent?"
This isn't really even a contrived example. Many people undergo medical procedures. Complications aren't common, but they're not rare, either, and they vary greatly in magnitude and long-term effects. A staggering proportion of people are on a course of some kind of medication (antivirals, pain relievers, more specialized stuff) at any given time. Figuring out how medications interact is aggressively nontrivial, and while there exist databases that can correlate medications and tell you if any are known to conflict with eachother (either always or under certain circumstances — information which, in most cases, was documented through case studies), this information still has to be reviewed by a trained medical professional — an MD familiar with the patient's medical history, ideally — who can say with a good degree of confidence whether a treatment is likely or not to cause the patient harm.
I can maybe get on board with naturopathic treatments, provided there's some scientific evidence behind them, but "alternative health" usually means homeopathy, mysticism, or something equally woo that has no basis in verifiable fact.
Usually it's about as scientific as a blood letting. "My friend Norma Rae had cancer and she sat under a pyramid whose sides were constructed of juniper wood cut in the golden ratio to focus the purifying energy of the salt crystals and she got better! Doctors don't know everything."
We definitely do not live in that ideal word where this is often enough true. Just take a look at the zerocarb/carnivore community and, just as a random example, IBD and Chron's remission, or keto and type 2 diabetes, etc.
Right, so if there's no evidence that something is effective at treating $medicalCondition then what is the difference between that and sitting under a pyramid made of juniper?
I just used it as an umbrella term. That you chose to associate it with "woo" exactly illustrate my point about reflexive dismissal.
I'm talking about things like high-dose vitamins, some medicinal plants, various therapies like cold exposure, etc. Nothing unscientific or mystical about them, just that, as with other chronic ailments, doctors are not trained or knowledgeable on, for the most part.
That takes time, interest from the medical community, and expensive studies. People with a chronic and unrecognized condition don't have that luxury.
But actually, yes, some of them have, maybe not for this particular condition, but one can make reasonable inferences that some are worth trying. And anecdotes have value too.
They can have value to an invidiual, not everything can or has to be science, and remember this is about an area that lacks any science, not even recognized by doctors.
> There is no doctor-delivered treatment, but there are many paths in the alternative health communities
Can you share some peer reviewed literature on these treatments? I've heard of a lot of "cures" shared by people like Bret Weinstein and Robert Malone, but they're thoroughly debunked and pretty obviously not real solutions, or placebos at best. Maybe you're referring to something else though?
I can't, I was making a general statement. There are several large communities around this, that have collectively assembled knowledge about things that sometimes work.
