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File on 4: Long Covid: Mind Over Matter?

Long Covid: Mind Over Matter?

BBC Radio 4 - File on 4, Long Covid: Mind Over Matter?

The programme claiming to retrain patients' brains to stop long Covid symptoms.

Around two million people in the UK have long Covid. Rachel Schraer investigates a controversial programme that claims to retrain patients' brains to stop their symptoms.

There are some two million people with long Covid in the UK - and most of them - around one and a half million - have symptoms that interfere with day to day activities. Fatigue, breathlessness, heart palpitations and severe dizziness are just some of the conditions people experience.

Currently there’s no test for long covid and it could be years before we know for sure how best to treat the condition. This struggle to get help is leaving some very unwell people desperate - and willing to try anything to get better. There are treatments to wash your blood, high pressure oxygen chambers normally used by deep sea divers. A rainbow of supplements. All with varying degrees of evidence. And perhaps most strongly dividing opinion - programmes that claim to retrain long Covid patients' brains to stop their symptoms. They say they can help people recover from illness by rewiring the brain using techniques to influence physical changes in the body. Rachel Schraer - the BBC's health and disinformation correspondent - hears from people with long Covid who say the programmes didn't work and in some cases made them feel worse. Others say they fully recovered. 
  
Reporter: Rachel Schraer
Producer: Paul Grant
Technical producers: Cameron Ward and Nicky Edwards
Production co-ordinator: Tim Fernley 
Editor: Carl Johnston

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