there's an interesting number of contradictions in this field or things viewed as best practice that no longer remotely are and of which have been disproven or viewed as harmful which are still done and the contradiction of "condition doesn't exist / is patients seeking attention" but also "can't donate blood because of the not real condition" is something i didn't consider until reading this.
on some of the other medical subreddits you'll often see conditions disparaged as being 'psychosomatic' or 'malingering' [ie, ME/CFS] despite etiologies increasingly being established for these conditions. in residency or your clinicals, you'll get told by a guy [who, probably got told by a guy, who got told by a guy] about how something supposedly doesn't exist or is fake- and it's complete bullshit a lot of the time. it's healthcare wive's tales, but empowered by the smugness of upper education and sunk cost fallacy to paying 200k for med school.
fibromyalgia and IgG to mind, as does POTS and inflammatory biomarkers to cytokines/chemokines to some specific G-protein adrenergic receptors- this would make these conditions autoimmune, and genetics is also seemingly associating them with the same chromosome [chromosome 6] where many other autoimmune conditions like lupus or rheumatoid arthritis exist on, with specific alleles.
it's also very coincidental as to a post elsewhere at the top of the subreddit right now about long COVID- COVID is more adequately described as an airborne vasculopathic illness, not a respiratory one, and because we're still behind on our thinking to this, we're missing loads of patients and largely worsening their health outcomes to this.
with it being a vasculopathic illness, it'll seemingly encourage the proteins to do "angiogenesis" [tumors seeking to increase blood supply to metastasize also do this] which is what our body will do to create new blood vessels.
this is beneficial as an agonist medication in a controlled environment because in the case of heart attack or stroke, where there's often heart muscle damage [cardiac cachexia, and weight loss in general] or vascular damage, encouraging the regrowth as opposed to letting heart attack and stroke victims naturally recover on their own while they slowly gain back function would be preferable.
with TBIs, neuroplasticity and regaining function works similar and we've noted there's key moments after a TBI where interventions can essentially dramatically change the clinical course of the patient if they're done early- caffeine ethenyl infusions and methamphetamine in low therapeutic doses being neuroprotective for TBI patients. otherwise, patients have a low and drawn out prognosis with how they're slowly recovering to regain the function they had pre-injury- if they even get it at all.
for long COVID, it speaks to a possible agonist of this activity, and having it not happen- avoiding vascular changes in the body with the thrombophilia or microclotting we're seeing in the ER [to a very noticeable degree] lately. that's why they've been doing studies with aspirin post-COVID recovery and it possibly helping to this, and reducing stroke chance.
this would be probably why [my suspicion, that is] you're seeing something like POTS [something implicitly involving blood circulation, to a very layman sense] or "COVID toes" [basically raynaud's phenomenon] or metabolic issues / cognitive issues with attention / focus / brain fog, memory issues, emotional processing difficulties, and such forth and so on- almost like vascular dementia and how that can happen due to atherosclerosis, chronic heart disease / high blood pressure in general, stroke, etc.
i'm a trans woman, i've been transitioning since 18 years old- i'm turning 25 in 6 days- and i've met countless physicians who did not know how to do the most basic bare minimum to take care of me. now that i'm much more medically educated- i realize they either simply just did not care, or were too lazy to do the bare minimum, as i've come to know that treating trans people is quite a basic and not difficult task, and the hormones we're taking actually are not that remotely dangerous, complicated, or difficult to understand.
ultimately often times it feels that large swathes of my colleagues are a whole one or two decades behind on literature, or that they've made zero attempts to continue their education upon finishing residency. and that scares me! the belief is essentially "i do not understand this subject, so it mine as well not exist" and it's completely insane to me.