What is the proper treatment for long COVID? New clinics seek answers.

USA TODAY What is the proper treatment for long COVID? New clinics seek answers. While the list of symptoms associated with long-haul COVID-19 may be long, the list of medications to treat it is short. But doctors – and their patients – don’t have the luxury of waiting for the science to catch up with the virus. As more people survive COVID-19 infections yet continue to suffer, health care has begun to respond with multidisciplinary clinics that connect patients with a range of experts. They work together to devise a plan, operating without a playbook because treatment guidelines have yet to be written. Demand already exceeds supply at many clinics, an ongoing challenge, said Dr. Peter Staats, who serves on the medical advisory board for Survivor Corps, a grassroots group of COVID-19 survivors. CHANGED BY COVID

Day three of a weeklong USA TODAY Network series exploring long-haul COVID-19, the people who’ve suffered and the experts trying to help them. If you don’t want to miss future stories in this series, sign up for our COVID-19 newsletter here. “This is a huge and tremendous problem,” said Staats, a pain specialist and president of the Institute of World Pain. “This is going to be a wave of health care problems that we have not seen the likes of before.” Doctors are encountering patients like Lisa O’Brien, a 43-year-old auditor and single mother of two who lives just north of Salt Lake City. She fell ill and got better – until she didn’t. O’Brien’s heart raced, she was out of breath and felt zinging vibrations in her body, as though her nerve endings were being repeatedly shocked. She frequently would lie down on the floor just to feel less bad. But when she tried to get help, she found herself trying to prove she was sick. Doctors brushed off her concerns. A few offered her anxiety medication. Nothing helped. “My body was so dysfunctional, and not behaving the way it should, and nobody had any answers,” O’Brien said. “It was a nightmare.” Then, in June 2020, O’Brien found the Mount Sinai Center for Post COVID Care in New York City, one of the first clinics in the country for patients with post-infection COVID-19 illness.