Reactive arthritis, previously known as Reiter's syndrome,[1] is a form of inflammatory arthritis[2] that develops in response to an infection in another part of the body (cross-reactivity). Coming into contact with bacteria and developing an infection can trigger the disease.[3] By the time a person presents with symptoms, the "trigger" infection has often been cured or is in remission in chronic cases, thus making determination of the initial cause difficult.
The most common triggers are intestinal infections (with Salmonella, Shigella or Campylobacter) and sexually transmitted infections (with Chlamydia trachomatis);[8] however, it also can happen after group A streptococcal infections.[9][10]
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Finding out about autonomic dysfunction and small fiber neuropathy as I researched my own fatigue and finding out I likely have this has been very challenging.
Please don't do this. It's the medical equivalent of copy/pasting shit you don't understand from Stack Overflow.
Go see a doctor who has a degree and training.
I agree with your general thrust of course, you’re much more likely to incorrectly diagnose yourself doing this than correctly, and walking around with a false belief is worse than walking around with uncertainty. But simply saying, “go see a doctor,” is rarely helpful. I’ve never heard of someone who tried to diagnose themselves without first presenting the issue to a physician.
These sorts of conditions are systemic, and the causes and ways of dealing with the accompanying syndromes are probably always going to be different from individual to individual (well, likely the exact physiological causes anyway).
There was a SARS vaccine as far as back 2016 which could have changed everything but was ignored. Pharmaceutical execs told them they were, "waiting to see if it comes back yearly" first
The findings also support the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 may cause structural nerve damage, which is perhaps the even bigger worry. :(
One theory is that the immune system doesn't always produce a strong enough antibody response to flush the virus from all these areas but the truth is that's likely only a subset of total cases.
they are also distinct from other conditions like ME/CFS or other sequelae although they may share overlapping symptoms. A lot of research is going into different PAIS post acute infection syndromes
Secondly, the majority of burden is caused by CNS/brain dysfunction, especially a form of neurotransmitter depletion, and not due to peripheral autonomous imbalance. And the former is a much more difficult therapeutic target: in my experience incurable for ever but also quite more rare that it is shown in the media.
Widespread issues all over the body without readily obvious organ damage is nearly always nerves/brain.
99% of physicians wouldn’t know what to do with specialized test results anyway, even if they’d know what/how to order in the first place. Internists don’t know how to read PET scans, radiologists don’t know anything about homeostasis. general radiology cant even read head&neck scans, you want a specialized radiologist for that. geneticists don’t have the slightest idea about how to read nerve studies, which is actually a completely separate certification, not even every neurologist has it or does them.
Medicine is the game of super-specialization.
And nobody wants to bother to try to piece it all together for you. Very few MDs are actually able to, in the first place.
Ideally, you have a very broadly competent internist to figure out what direction to even start digging at, and then find the sub specialist who has the expertise AND interest in that area.
eg NIH’s section on neuro cardiology recently closed because this one dude who was REALLY into simply was too old, couldnt find a replacement or build a bigger lab that could sustain itself and retired.
At times you need a specialist trained and practicing in two different specialties: eg ENT + neuro, for example. Those can be hard to find. Neuro cardio more common especially now.
If you sleep over 11 hrs per 24 hours: that’s pathological and they will be prescribed.
Fall asleep faster than X minutes? Same diagnosis, same meds.
Have apnea and yet still fatigued/sleepy after CPAP/surgery? Same meds.
Fulfill criteria for ADHD? Same meds.
Fatigue after TBI? Same meds.
Fatigue with MS? Same meds.
The root cause may or may not be eventually found, but there is no reason to get diagnosed with whatever is most useful to begin at least supporting treatment.
I'm saying that it's "like" AIDS in that we are seeing only the top layer, we don't understand what connects them. With AIDS we in time found a common failure in the immune system that by itself didn't produce symptoms, just enabled other failures. And then we found the virus that causes that immune failure.
With Long Covid we have not yet recognized whatever failure they have in common.
And look at how society reacted to AIDS back then. We are doing a lot of the same things with Long Covid.
A sizable percentage of autoimmune cases of well accepted autoimmune diseases (rheumatoid arthritis, celiac, etc etc etc ) are completely seronegative despite glaringly obvious clinical signs: eg peeing skin, deformed joints etc etc - all blood work perfectly normal. Happens all the time.
Why would we expect anything different here?
Sort of like, okay, if I have a hundred water balloons and I dropped fifty of those water balloons off the top of my house growing up, and fifty off the top of the Empire State building, would the latter always be that much worse? Just a few off the first and I can guess the outcome, and let's call that a control group, but the second, who knows... sure you might get lucky and knock one or two people out (or get a couple of good people showing results or seeming connections you want in a study) but you probably need more than a few to prove it isn't just a fluke. ;) Okay, messing around with the water balloons. Not with the study thing.