Last April, in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece called “The Dubious Origins of Long Covid,” Jeremy Devine, a psychiatry resident at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, called it “largely an invention of vocal patient activist groups” — a reference to advocates like the members of Body Politic, an online support group that drew early public attention to the issue with a self-published survey.

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“It is clear to me that medicine has fallen into a pattern where the jump to ‘this is psychological’ is instant,” he said. “Something is very wrong with the way we are dealing with illnesses where there isn’t a clear biomarker or clear abnormality on examination.” Khan is a member of a private Facebook group of more than 1,400 doctors who either have long Covid themselves or want to learn more about it.

The effort to explain away these symptoms as psychosomatic is “rubbish” and demonstrates medicine’s blind spots, agreed Qureshi. His own physical deterioration should have triggered extensive investigations into possible organic factors, he said. Instead, he felt shunted aside by the health care system and had to move in with his parents when living alone became too challenging.