How people recovered from Long COVID and postvax (Jan 2026 updated version)

[glenn_chan]

I’ve surveyed over a thousand people on what they tried and what their health is now. Here are the key takeaways…

Many people recover and don’t know how it happened

Despite trying many treatments, many of the recovered report that nothing helped them or that time helped the most. They got better and they don’t know why. This is the most common way that people recover. You can recover without doing anything crazy or risky.

Maximizing your chances of recovery with data

I want to be responsible and do the right thing when I give out this information. So here’s the disclaimer:

While data exists on how you might maximize your chances, it may cause more harm than good.

Please understand that the data and The Science™ may turn out to be erroneous. Before there was Ozempic, Western doctors prescribed amphetamines for weight loss. ‘Medicine’ has a history of causing more harm than good.

Let’s get into the data, which may or may not be reliable.

HBOT (hyperbaric oxygen)

HBOT is the only treatment with a randomized controlled trial (RCT) that supports its use. A small fraction of patients saw a meaningful improvement. However, another RCT did NOT find a statistically significant difference. For more details, see this thread.

This is currently the most ‘proven’ treatment because it has the most credible RCT evidence supporting its use. See Long Haul Wiki for a list of all positive and negative RCTs on treatments.

Only ~5.8% of the people surveyed report trying high pressure HBOT. Recovery rates may be low because people don’t know about, aren’t trying, or aren’t getting access to the better treatments.

Almost everything has been tried

Before you get excited about a treatment that people are reporting success with, please know that thousands of patients means that less popular treatments have been tried by many people. I’ve made my survey data public so you can look up how many people tried a particular treatment (click this link).

There is data on treatments that probably don’t work. You might as well avoid those.

Out of everything that has been tried by 30+ people, the chances of recovery are very low.

If you are hellbent on recovery, you should anticipate trying a lot of treatments.

• There is no solid evidence that trying a lot of treatments is a good idea. The people who recover tend to try fewer treatments, though it may be a correlation rather than causation.

Time is a limited resource. Committing months or years to a single treatment means that you aren’t taking many shots on goal. (It’s probably a good idea to try treatments one at a time so that you will know what each individual treatment actually does.)

You can also look up how common negative experiences are. Some treatments that are supposed to be safe, e.g. acupuncture, don’t seem to actually be that safe . Exercise is the worst intervention when it comes to patients reporting negative experiences. A few treatments like pacing strategies and low histamine diet appear to be safe.

Double edged swords

If there are treatments that help, survey data indicates that the majority of those treatments also cause negative experiences in some people. Perhaps one way around that is to:

• Start with low doses
• Stop treatment if symptoms are going in the wrong direction

This is the prudent approach commonly used for experimental medicine.

I’ve released the survey data on which treatments are the most likely to lead to recovery. When I have time I’ll make updated information more accessible (e.g. in an easy-to-understand list) like I did in this older video.

Why is long haul hard to treat?

Suppose that patients have already discovered the treatments that are effective. This would mean that there are multiple overlapping and inter-related causes for Long COVID, ME/CFS, and postvax (vaccine injury). Multiple underlying causes would explain why response rates for treatment are so low. It would also explain why symptoms are different from patient to patient- patients are drawing from the same pool of causes and symptoms but everybody gets a different combination.

We have no tests for determining the underlying causes. That means that we can’t predict the outcome of treatments… so the best that we can do is to try treatments one at a time.

Microbes as the cause of chronic illness would explain the underlying causes. Microbes would explain why (most) antimicrobials act as double edged swords. Antimicrobial treatments may be a good place to look for potential treatments.

• But, be very cautious with antibiotics. The risk/reward on them appears to be pretty bad; it would be prudent to avoid them.

And old list of antimicrobials can be found here (in the slides). Lion’s mane mushroom may be dangerous though, see r/LionsManeRecovery/ before proceeding.

What I would actually do myself

I’ve tried drugs from ex-Soviet bloc countries that aren’t approved in the West. I’m not a stranger to experimental medicine.

But now I realize that I shouldn’t have done anything crazy to recover. I should have stuck to eating a certain way and trying new foods (e.g. black seed oil). This is because different foods have different antimicrobial chemicals. People may be recovering because their diet changed over time. I explain that way of eating below:

Treatment idea: Antimicrobials naturally found in food could be how people recover naturally from long haul

The idea is that plants contain antimicrobial chemicals. If you try enough plants by eating flavorful foods, then you may eventually stumble across something that leads to recovery. I’ll discuss my experiences and some theory. How it works We know that chemical warfare is an effective way of dealing with bacterial, parasitic, and fungal infections. Antibiotics and antifungal chemicals are the most common way of fighting infections. Doctors no longer use malaria to fight syphilis bacteria (…

Looking back, I would prioritize safety. Eating supermarket food is (likely) one of the safer things out there.

Recovery stories and compilations of recovery stories

You can find these in survey data, Reddit r/LongHaulersRecovery, and Youtube. There’s a decent summary of 60 stories from Reddit.

However, with time and experience, you will discover that there are various issues with these recovery stories.

Information is more unreliable than you think

Many of us are indoctrinated into thinking that the scientific literature is supposed to be credible because of peer review. However, I’ve compiled links to the scientific literature on Long COVID and postvax at Long Haul Wiki. You will quickly discover that the claimed results rarely line up with reality. And you may be disheartened to find that most doctors don’t know or don’t care about this.

We don’t have the answers that most patients want

I’ve really looked for answers.

• Highly experimental drugs that aren’t approved for human use anywhere (e.g. GS-44). Here’s how you figure out how to get them.
• Recovery stories
• The scientific literature
• Survey data that myself and others have collected

Patients have tried almost everything.

So the question is… have we already discovered the effective treatments? (There’s no solid evidence either way.)

• If the answer is no, then it’s a medical mystery as to why some people recover.
• If the answer is yes, then the recovery rates on those treatments are really low. You’ll likely need to try a lot of treatments.

A practical approach is to focus on risk and to try the treatments where the gamble (risk level) is acceptable to you. You get to decide the level of dumb / crazy / desperate that you are willing to accept.

So… that’s the best answer that we have right now. I wish we had better answers but it is what it is.

[glenn_chan]

Deeper dive topics

This section is for those of you who like nuance and the bitter taste of truth. You don’t have to read this section. To be honest, most of it is depressing.

Chronic illness surveys mostly don’t measure health outcomes / Any good data is mixed in with bad data

Chronic illness surveys mostly measure the unintuitive ways that people fill out surveys. We’d like surveys to measure health outcomes. Unfortunately, they mostly measure other things. This is partly because the effect of treatment (if it exists) is very weak.

For example, when survey design is not great, the survey participants will basically fill out 2 different surveys. The resulting data is mashed together and the findings will be erroneous. That is how the PLRC group reported a diarrhea rate of 59.7% while Kenny and colleagues reported a rate of 2.6%. We’re interested in medically unusual diarrhea and not the normal kind of diarrhea that everybody gets once in a while. The PLRC group accidentally measured normal diarrhea- which is why they started telling people that diarrhea is one of the most common Long COVID symptoms.

Apparently none of the peer reviewers pointed out that the PLRC methodology was problematic. Despite this, their survey paper has thousands of citations . This is why I don’t trust the peer review process or the scientific literature.

I go into more detail on that below:

Survey research is one way to spot bad science

[image] What you need to know about “science” in general is that most of it is political. A lot of it is unreliable because politics ruin everything. That’s part of the reason why people aren’t healing from chronic illness. Advocacy groups and clinicians told patients to get the COVID vaccine. Then the Long COVID and ME/CFS patients injured by them started coming into the vax injury support groups. For survey research, most people don’t understand it because they’ve never done it. They’r…

The biggest issue is how patients report/misreport their outcomes.

Some of the RCTs have found that the control group getting no treatment ‘improved’ over the course of the clinical trial. This would appear to be a ‘placebo’ effect. (I personally think that people are misreporting their outcomes and that it’s something other than a placebo effect. Whatever.) There is something going on that causes people to report improved health even though they did not receive a treatment that could improve their health.

One recovered person in my survey data said that Hope Biosciences stem cells helped them the most. The issue is that we have randomized controlled trial data on those HopeBio stem cells. Unfortunately that RCT failed. So we know that the survey data in that case is erroneous- the survey data suggests that it’s an effective treatment when that isn’t actually the case.

The reason why medicine and The Science™ don’t work for chronic illness

It’s because it’s not medicine and not science. The underlying problem is people. A few people are charlatans and make stuff up. Those are the people who rise to the top. They want attention and they will make stuff up to get it. Some of them don’t do it for the money- they just want some specific kind of attention.

There are many ways of manipulating data to generate bogus science. For example, you can ignore your own data on microclots and mislead patients into thinking that they are the cause of their Long COVID or postvax symptoms. Their data clearly shows that some normal healthy people have abnormal microclotting and that some chronic illness patients don’t.

And here’s why you shouldn’t rely on the peer review process to weed out bad science:

This picture of a rat with giant balls got past peer review. It’s levels of embarrassing.

Patients constantly get scammed

You can look at the Youtube channel and Twitter/X account of PhysicsGirl, who has 3.5M subscribers. In early videos of her battle with Long COVID, her husband/caregiver talks optimistically about her recovery. Clearly he got scammed by bad information because PhysicsGirl still hasn’t returned to work. I don’t like it when really sick people get scammed.

Safety is a blind spot

For political reasons, the FDA and CDC want somewhat unsafe drugs to hit the market. Not too dangerous but not too safe. Why? They want the power to gatekeep what gets pulled from the market. Then they can get paid to not pull drugs from the market.

During the clinical trials for the HPV vaccine and the COVID vaccines, patients suffered serious side effects. Some of those patients have gone public to dispute the safety data reported for those trials. After drugs hit the market, the problems continue.

The Unites States’ VAERS system is fairly well-designed when it comes to monitoring safety issues, usually after the clinical trials end. The problem is the people running it. Their agenda is to find safety problems so that they can hide them. We know this because the VAERS people will process patient reports and add them to a public database. They will also remove reports from that database after they ‘investigate’ and come up with some BS reason to ignore safety information. Because there is a website that archives the public database, we can see what reports were removed.

• Here’s the deleted record for Olivia Teseniar. She was injured in the Moderna clinical trial.
• FOIA requests found that the CDC was actively discussing the case of a 2-year old Alaskan who died hours after vaccination. They ‘found’ reasons to deem the report not credible. That baby’s VAERS number 1887456 was deleted from the public database. Tom Shimabukuro knew about the 2-year old while he told the public something else and downplayed vaccine safety issues.

Early on in the vaccine roll-out, the VAERS people quickly figured out that vaccine injury was a multi-symptom syndrome. I know this because some vaccine injured people were talking to Peter Marks and others at the CDC. Recordings of those conversations exist. The injured were also talking to them about MIS or multi-system inflammatory syndrome. They were asking the CDC to officially recognize it as a potential side effect of the vaccine. (What actually happened is that the CDC was actively looking for MIS in vaccinated patients due to what happened with the vaccines for SARS1 and pan-coronavirus vaccines. After the COVID vaccines (for SARS2) hit the market, the CDC quickly discovered that the COVID vaccines would cause MIS itself. They initially buried that information.)

Unsafe practices are baked into the medical systems in Western countries. We should not trust the scientific literature, the drug approval system, and the people at the letter agencies.

Mainstream doctors are trained to take the medical consensus as gospel. If everyone else is prescribing something, then they will follow the herd. That’s why they used to prescribe amphetamines for weight loss (decades before Ozempic). Amphetamines are a street drug.

As far as chronic illness goes, we don’t have any entity tracking treatment outcomes in chronic illness patients, who seem to behave differently than healthy patients (e.g. long haulers report negative experiences with acupuncture). My surveys won’t capture data from dead people like Heidi Ferrer or Eric Hauser, both of whom apparently tried a lot of risky treatments before they died. Regarding Heidi Ferrer, she tried a number of interventions like COVID vaccination, ivermectin, Ambien (zolpidem), and whatever Patterson/Yogendra recommended. It’s not clear to me if a treatment killed her, although COVID vaccination started the chain of events that led to her death (that is my interpretation of her eulogy).

The bottom line is that we don’t have good safety information. That’s why we should proceed cautiously.

I’ve been holding back

There’s a lot of bad behaviour out there from researchers, doctors (both mainstream and alternative), support group moderators, patients, the medical freedom movement, advocates, etc. I really wish I could tell you about things like the Bruce Patterson MD / IncellDx / SynLabs / Ria Heslop controversy. But then I would get sued. (Patterson is why many patients paid for his tests and tried statins/maraviroc as a treatment.)

I’m frustrated because I can’t properly warn you about issues that can be dangerous to your physical or mental health. But we can look at it like this: if Patterson is 100% right, then it would reflect poorly on Ria Heslop, who advocated for Long COVID and postvax patients. If Ria is in the right, then it would reflect poorly on Patterson, who is a researcher.

My overall message is this: don’t trust people. And don’t trust anything that you can’t verify.

There are serious problems with how doctors are educated

My research was used to train doctors. Because I don’t want to get sued, I won’t get into the specifics.

But we can talk about big pharma. Big pharma pays for the miseducation of doctors all the time. They spend a lot of money marketing their drugs- and it works. They can use their money to change the ‘standard of care’ (standard practice). The maker of gabapentin paid a $430M settlement because they used illegal tactics to get doctors to prescribe gabapentin “off label” for unapproved uses. Almost all gabapentin usage nowadays is for unapproved uses.

It’s not that doctors don’t know what they’re doing. It’s that some doctors think they know what they’re doing when they actually don’t. That’s the kind of doctor that can potentially be very dangerous. And because many treatments require a prescription, you may be exposed to these dangerous people.

One of the dangerous practices going on in the alternative medical system is that doctors will try to explain away your negative treatment-related symptoms as ‘detox’ or a ‘Herx’ (Herxheimer) reaction. That behaviour may cause you to waste time while experiencing unnecessary harm.

The bitter taste of truth

I’m sorry that the truth is what it is. I collected survey data because I ultimately want to see people get their lives back. However, peddling untruths or false hope won’t help. I’m not going to do that. Sick people deserve better than that.

I’m not a doom and gloom guy. I’m open to different approaches to recovery.

• If you want access to unapproved experimental drugs, I have a video on the Dallas Buyers Club approach.
• If you want to read the scientific literature, I’ve compiled a list of RCTs over at Long Haul Wiki.
• If you’re into recovery stories, check out the links here.

With experience, you will discover that it is easy to underestimate the dangers and to overestimate the potential benefit. That trap exists. I’m not convinced that you will recover faster if you repeatedly learn things the hard way.

In practice, you can simply wait and let other people try all of the craziest things out there. Some patients had BC007 synthesized for them so that they could get it without joining the clinical trial. Why be a guinea pig when other people will do it for you? Let them put their bodies on the line so you don’t have to.

Biased information and why the truth doesn’t get out

You often won’t know about the biases in the information that you get. There are support groups that will censor my work simply because I am the messenger. Criticism of the iTeracare wand (sold via multi level marketing) led to the silencing of myself and others. Many Long COVID support groups will discriminate against postvax (vaccine injured) patients. In many cases they are removed from the group and silenced that way.

I believe that many Long COVID support groups will not entertain a discussion about what killed Heidi Ferrer.

Social media algorithms are a problem

“Hope porn” does better on social media than accurate information. People want simple, easy-to-understand solutions for their health problems. Posts that “give” people what they want will get pushed by social media algorithms because it seems to be compelling content. Unfortunately it doesn’t work.

I’ve been trying to educate people about questionable information on social media like in the post below.

Engagement first, accuracy second: the problem with medical information on social media

[image] I naively thought that it would be helpful for long haulers to have a list of what doctors are trying to treat long haul. 7.2K views. But here’s the kicker: I don’t know if it indirectly caused more harm than good. When I first posted the list online, I didn’t realize that the doctors can’t all be right. There actually isn’t a long list of effective treatments with high response rates. Long COVID (and postvax and ME/CFS) would be easy to treat if that were the case…

But it just doesn’t get attention. Highly accurate technical information won’t help people if nobody reads it. Surveys don’t get filled out if people don’t learn about them. So nowadays I’m guilty of engaging titles clickbait. I think I’m ok at it- my most popular post on Reddit has 5 million views.

It’s still problematic because it gets in the way of patients’ health. Unreliable information will get pushed more than accurate information.

The low-risk and no-risk approach

If you don’t want to take risk, then see this post for information on safe treatments that alleviate symptoms.

Microbes would elegantly explain chronic illness

Patients have an infection of some sort but we don’t know what it is.

Take pneumonia for example, which is often caused by a bacteria called Streptococcus pneumoniae. This bacteria commonly lives in healthy people without problems. However, for reasons that we don’t yet fully understand, they cause problems in some people and are therefore pathogenic.

Other microbes such as fungi and viruses also have this property- they live in healthy people without problems but sometimes turn pathogenic. The microbes responsible for Long COVID and post-vax (vaccine injury) likely resided in the body well before illness began. Everybody has microbes living inside them and typically they only cause minor problems. For example, fasciculations (involuntary rapid muscle twitches that are too weak to move a limb) existed before Long COVID and post-vax as there has been a condition called Benign Fasciculation Syndrome. Chronic illness sufferers just happen to have a long list of problems (of varying severity) while healthy people have a very short list of low-impact problems.

Sufferers don’t have the exact same combination of microbes so that’s why their problems are different.

Wrapping it up

I’ve tried my best to outline the best that we can do right now. Based on that, you can make realistic plans and avoid unnecessary harm to yourself. I hope it helps.

TLDR: Go to the supermarket. See the section “What I would actually do myself”.