Our position on the iPaper article

Yesterday, 23rd July, the iPaper published an article on ME/CFS and Long Covid titled "75 people claim to be cured of chronic fatigue and long Covid. Here's how"

Long Covid SOS is listed at the end of this article as an organisation offering support to people living with Long Covid. We welcome signposting to reputable patient-focused charities. However, we do not support the article’s implication that Long Covid or ME/CFS can be “cured” through changes in mindset or a mind-body approach. We agree with the ME Association’s statement on this piece.

Long Covid is a complex multisystem condition. Research continues to identify measurable biological abnormalities affecting the immune, vascular and nervous systems, metabolism and other organs.

Rehabilitation, psychological support and coping strategies may help some people manage chronic illness. But they are not evidence-based cures for Long Covid or ME/CFS, and they should not be presented as such.

When these approaches are framed as treatment, they can encourage self-blame and delay proper biomedical assessment. For people with post-exertional malaise (PEM), they may also worsen symptoms by pushing activity beyond safe limits.

Recovery experiences are important, but they do not show that one explanatory model or intervention will work for everyone. Long Covid is heterogeneous, and what helps one person may be ineffective or harmful for another.

For people with PEM or PESE, excessive activity or unsuitable treatment approaches can trigger relapse and prolonged, sometimes permanent, baseline deterioration.

People living with Long Covid and ME/CFS deserve rigorous biomedical research, evidence-based care and accurate communication. People with ME/CFS have been gaslit for years by pseudoscientific claims, and it is long overdue that stopped. The science has more than caught up with this outdated narrative.

Suggesting that recovery depends primarily on adopting a “mind-body” model is misleading. It reinforces the false idea that these illnesses are psychological and shifts responsibility onto patients when they do not improve.

Long Covid SOS will continue to advocate for high-quality biomedical research, safe evidence-based treatment and appropriate support for everyone living with this condition.

We call on journalists and editors to report on Long Covid responsibly, reflecting the current state of biomedical evidence and avoiding headlines that risk misleading patients or reinforcing harmful misconceptions.