Treating Long Covid - Latest What Your GP Doesn't Tell You Podcast
Dr Lisa Sanders discusses potential treatments for long covid and explains why she believes the condition has similarities with other post-viral syndromes
The latest episode of the What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You Podcast - Treating Long Covid is now available on Apple, Spotify and other podcast platforms. And you can sign up to the podcast mailing list at What Your GP Doesn't Tell You, where you can also find out more about the pod. The next episode of the podcast will go out on Tuesday 23rd January 2024.
This week, I am talking to Dr Lisa Sanders, whose New York Times column Diagnosis was the inspiration for the Fox medical drama House, M.D. . The show in which Dr Gregory House, played by Hugh Laurie, was regularly able to diagnosis the most obscure of medical conditions. But today Sanders has a rather tougher challenge than arguably Hugh Laurie ever faced, she’s the Medical Director of a new clinic at Yale called the Long Covid Multidisciplinary Care Center.
I started our conversation by asking her if she had ever struggled to make a diagnosis.
A particular challenge for medical professionals in diagnosing and treating long covid is the fact that the condition can affect multiple systems and organs, which makes it extremely tough for doctors to get patients the help and care they require.
The need to involve a number of different medical sub-specialities may help explain why finding effective treatments for long covid has proved to be so difficult. However, in the podcast, Sanders reveals approaches that she has used that it appears can help at least some patients.
She argues that we need to see long covid not as entirely new phenomenon, but in the context of many other post-acute infection syndromes, such as ME/CFS and flu. Controversially, Sanders suggests that it required enough doctors to become ill with long covid for the profession to start taking these conditions more seriously.
You can hear my full conversation with Sanders on this week’s podcast.
Dr Lisa Sanders is the Medical Director of Yale's Long Covid Multidisciplinary Care Center. She had a somewhat unusual career path working as a journalist for both ABC and CBS news, before retraining as a doctor in her thirties. Lisa has published a number of books, including several about diagnosis, and is currently researching clinical decision making and the way diagnostic decisions and errors are made.
You can find out more about the podcast at What Your GP Doesn't Tell You and follow me on Twitter @lizctucker.
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