No idea who this person is, but this article reads like LLM text to my eyes. It has that telltale writing style. Very short phrases and paragraphs less than 10 words long. It's incoherent in that subtle and paradoxically formulaic way where the article kind of has a common thread that ties it all together, but not really. It uses exactly the kind of pseudo-creative adjectives AI loves to do.
Constant "This is not merely X. This is y." phrasing:
These are not figures that describe a rare complication..
They describe a mass disabling event.
[...]
The problem was not simply that Long COVID was new. The deeper problem was what that invisibility revealed
[...]
Long COVID did not simply introduce a new chronic illness.
It exposed the limits of a healthcare system built around the assumption that illnesses are only fully real once they become visible through testing.
[...]
Long COVID did not create medicine’s discomfort with invisible illness. It exposed a preexisting pattern that millions of patients had been navigating for decades.
Oh man there's so many of these I'm going to stop quoting them now. Just kidding let's do one more.
For many disabled and chronically ill patients, Long COVID did not reveal a new medical phenomenon.
It revealed how selectively medicine has historically recognized suffering.
The "A, B, and C -- but D, E and F instead." pattern:
Patients arrived at clinical appointments with devastating functional impairment — unable to work, unable to sustain basic daily activities, unable to recover from even modest exertion — and left with normal labs, unremarkable imaging, and an absence of clear answers.
[...]
It was not designed for chronic ambiguity, multisystem illness, longitudinal complexity, or fluctuating disability. It was designed for throughput — for the patient who comes in, receives a diagnosis, receives a treatment, and gets better.
Lists, lists, lists, I hecking love lists, even when I'm not using unordered lists half my sentences are lists:
Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), fibromyalgia, dysautonomia, POTS — these conditions share remarkable clinical overlap with Long COVID, and they share something else too: a history of being dismissed, minimized, and inadequately researched.
[...]
The patients who had been told their exhaustion was anxiety, their exercise intolerance was deconditioning, or their cognitive problems were psychological were not imagining their symptoms.
[...]
Once millions of previously healthy people began experiencing chronic exhaustion, cognitive dysfunction, and functional instability simultaneously, the limitations of the healthcare system became far harder to dismiss.
[...]
They are optimized for acute stabilization, procedural intervention, and emergency response. They excel when a patient presents with a broken bone, a heart attack, a bacterial infection — conditions with clear biological signatures, established treatment pathways, and the expectation of resolution.
[...]
Around the world, hospitals and clinics rapidly created new Long COVID programs in real time. Multidisciplinary teams brought together primary care doctors, neurologists, cardiologists, pulmonologists, rehabilitation specialists, psychiatrists, and physical therapists because no single specialty could fully manage the condition alone.
(also, "in real time", really Claude? how the fuck else would they create them, in stop motion?)
Straight up nonsense:
For many patients with these conditions, the sudden visibility of Long COVID was bittersweet. Mainstream medicine was finally confronting the same problems they had been trying to describe for decades.
What is this nonsense phrase? "Bittersweet" is one of the sterile adjectives I mentioned above. And "for decades"? Covid happened 5 years ago my Claude.
Okay I got about 2/3rds through and I'm now 100% sure.
Graded S for slop. Don't see me after class, you're expelled.
