Survey: The role of internal medicine in the care of patients with long COVID

Dear EFIM colleagues,

On behalf of the French and the Belgian Societies of Internal Medicine we kindly invite you to participate in a survey to investigate the role of internal medicine in the care of patients with long COVID.
The medical literature  emphasizes multiple viral or immune phenomena to explain the pathophysiology of long COVID. These putative biological explanations often cause patients to desperately seek biomedical abnormalities and drug treatments, which may prevent them from accepting holistic care.
In contrast, many clinicians believe that long COVID is mainly a consequence of psychological distress or a functional somatic disorder, rather than a direct consequence of SarsCoV 2 infection. But many doctors equate functional somatic disorder with simulation and/or strongly underestimate their health impact, which is also a factor in maintaining symptoms.

We would like to gather the opinion of European internists on how COVID should be addressed in our healthcare system.

Please find the link for our very short questionnaire (5 questions) :  European internists and long COVID

Investigators:

Prof. Brigitte RANQUE (Paris) French Society of Internal Medicine and Prof. Elie Cogan (Brussels), Belgian Society of Internal Medicine