Sparks: Long COVID patients are told symptoms are in their head - here’s how to change the narrative

The matter is this: when a man is told his suffering is a fiction of his mind, he is being ruled by a priesthood of experts who prefer their own dogmas to the evidence of his pulse.

Victory over the plague is declared by decree, yet we remain subjects to a biological tyranny that the official map of our recovery refuses to acknowledge, leaving the afflicted to wander in a stateless exile of the body.

Medical authority, once granted the absolute power to define reality for the weak, invariably protects its own prestige by dismissing the anomalies that threaten the stability of its established diagnostic cathedrals.

The claim is that the malady exists only in the mind, yet this boundary between the thought and the tissue depends on a division that dissolves the moment one attempts to locate the independent existence of either.

Psychological labels are the modern priest’s way of punishing the sick for failing to be useful to the herd, transforming the exhaustion of the organism into a moral failing of the will.

They have built a new room of iron where the walls are made of medical charts, and when the suffocating scream for help, the doctors outside congratulate themselves on the silence of the data.

Simplify the dispute to its essential fact: a man knows his own fatigue better than any inspector who measures life by a ledger and dismisses the heavy cost of a day’s labor he does not have to perform.

When the meat of the machine breaks down and the joints refuse the command of the brain, no amount of polite talk from the comfortable office can warm the cold marrow of a body that has stopped working.

We are told the lingering fatigue is a mental variation, yet we observe how the smallest change in the microscopic environment produces a population of survivors whose fitness for the old world has been irrevocably altered by the struggle.

Arguments about the mind don't matter when the legs won't carry the weight, so you just keep moving toward the truth until the people who say you aren't hurting are left behind in the dark.

"The patient’s subjective complaints lack objective clinical correlates." - note how the language of science is used to suggest that the only thing missing from the illness is the person actually suffering from it.

It was considered extremely bad form for Clovis to remain bedridden when the garden party required his wit, so the family naturally decided he was merely practicing a very tedious form of performance art.