🔬☀️ Field Notes: Long Covid & mitochondria discoveries, facial SBF50 sunscreen, imagining a Perfect Day
Plus, Arnold Schwarzenegger writes a sweet newsletter, encouraging all of us regular humans to lift weights: "It's body insurance."
Hello, dear friends! Thanks for the outpouring of title suggestions in my last First Readers post: What should I call this book? — wow! So many great ideas! I appreciate you so much.
I’ve been hearing of more and more Covid cases, some among friends who are getting it for the first time. (I’m hoping you feel much better soon. 💗 ) I still haven’t gotten Covid (that I know of) and feel conflicted about whether to take more precautions — start wearing a mask again in the grocery, skip the gym, stop going to indoor gatherings like concerts and church. Long Covid is real and can be terribly life-altering; more about that below in the first 3 items of this week’s Field Notes.
Here are this week’s Field Notes, 6 interesting things I’ve run across lately related to wellness, illness, and the medical system
1} Long Covid: Mitochondria, the Big Miss, and Hope (Ground Truths newsletter) — Dr. Eric Topol dives into explaining a new study in Science Translational Medicine tying Long Covid to mitochondria (our cells’ energy factories) dysfunction in some people, suppressing the mitochondria’s work by binding to the proteins. This disrupts energy production and creates an immune response. Mitochondria impairment has also been seen in people with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS). The good news, I suppose, is that there is a clearer target for research on potential treatments and that scientists are taking Long Covid (and ME/CFS) more seriously. But as Dr. Topol also points out, we are late to this work. Here’s the stark way he put it:
He also shares the dismal results of the $1.15 billion spent on the NIH’s RECOVER Long Covid initiative, of which just 15% went to clinical trials. hHe closes with a hopeful path for the future — to recruit Long Covid participants online to be sent the medication (real option or placebo) through the mail, so a large study could be done quickly. “With so many millions of people affected, it should not be difficult or costly to rapidly accrue tens of thousands, and well over one hundred thousand, participants. It is well suited for repurposed drugs or devices, and would not work as easily for investigational drugs … There is no shortage of very reasonable repurposed candidate drugs to test …” Let’s hope that empty box can be filled with new validated treatments soon.
2} Long covid has derailed my life. Make no mistake: It could yours, too. (The Washington Post, gift link) — Novelist Madeline Miller, the author of The Song of Achilles and Circe, shares her devastating story of contracting Covid in early 2020 and the compounding horrors of a medical system that for so long didn’t believe her symptoms and that of millions of others were real.
3} You Should Honour Severe ME Day. There are 4.5 to 6 million reasons why (Armchair Rebel newsletter) — Speaking of ME, I learned from Michelle Spencer in her terrific newsletter that August 8th was Severe ME Day, set aside “to recognise and honour the strength and spirit of people living with severe ME.” (ME is also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome. You can read a short explanation of ME here and more about severely affected patients here. I was shocked to read that the CDC estimates 90 percent of ME cases are undiagnosed.) Of people with Severe ME, Michelle explains: “Housebound or bedbound, their symptoms are so severe they don’t have enough energy to meet their basic needs. As a result they are often invisible to the outside world, and even to medical researchers.” (That will hopefully start to change, as we saw in Dr. Topol’s note.) What can those of us without ME do to help? Here’s a tiny thing Michelle notes that’s not really so tiny at all: “As ME/cfs is not understood by medical researchers, it’s hard to know how to avoid getting worse. The current research points to pacing: resting before you get tired. You can make rest more of a choice, less stigmatised, by resting before you get completely exhausted.” 👈👈👈 This. Let’s all get our rest! Long Covid seems to be similar, in that trying to push through exhaustion makes it worse.
Thanks for reading about Long Covid and ME. Here are 3 more notes:
4} Strong daily facial sunscreen — For years, putting on facial lotion with sunscreen every morning has been part of my routine, right after brushing my teeth. After reading how much more protective 50 SPF sunscreen is than 15 SPF, and the long-term risks of UVA and UVB rays, I’ve been looking for a sunscreen to replace my 15 SPF Oil of Olay lotion. I didn’t want to use high-SPF beach sunscreens on my face each morning, which tend to be thick and sticky and leave a white frosting. Wirecutter did their usual rigorous testing on “The Best Sunscreens for Your Face” and picked Banana Boat Light as Air Face SPF 50+ (Wirecutter’s Amazon affiliate link) as their top choice. I ordered it, and can report – yes, it’s creamy, smooth, goes on invisibly, and smells kind of like Bubblicious gum, in a not-bad way, though once or twice it has felt slightly burny-tingling. I am also curious about other options, including Goop. Do you have a favorite high-SPF facial sunscreen you would recommend?
5} Arnold’s Pump Club: Monday Motivation — Even Arnold Schwarzenegger has a newsletter now, and his post are surprisingly sweetly encouraging and easy to read. In this post, he shares how he managed to record reading the audiobook of his next book, which was challenging because of his dyslexia. He also talks about how lifting weights is “body insurance” and offers one simple way to do weight-lifting reps, which honestly, I’m tempted to try with my 3-pound dumbbells. “From reducing joint pain, preventing cardiovascular disease, and even fighting depression, lifting weights is the closest thing we have to a magic pill.” He makes it clear in many of his posts that he’s writing to everyone on the physical spectrum, whether a milestone is rising out of bed or lifting hundreds of pounds. “When I tell you no one is self-made, and we all need help; or to celebrate your small wins because they build up into big victories; or that if you do the reps, you’ll feel more confident, those aren’t abstract ideas for me,” he writes. “They’re the rules that make my life work, every day.” I do like his positivity!
6} A Perfect Day (You Are Doing A Good Enough Job newsletter) — Sophie Lucido Johnson, a lovely and kind illustrator and writer, contemplates what her perfect day might look like, writes it down, and then decides to try to do it. She chronicles it for us, hour by hour, and it turns out that a perfect day for her involves singing to her chickens, writing, eating a simple salad, and so on. I found this post soothing and transportive, accompanying her as little joys go as planned and some not so much. Sophie concludes with lessons she observed, such as: "It’s good to plan your perfect day. If you know what it is supposed to look like, actualizing it is easier than you might have thought.” and “Mornings are for thinking, evenings are for feeling. I didn’t think of this.” Hmm. I could totally see that. I love the idea of thinking through a sweet day and what it would mean for you. I think it might make us more fully present and intentional in our day, too — maybe it’s adding a few minutes to stare at the clouds or savoring a cup of tea or calling a dear friend to hear their voice. If you try this, let us know how it goes!
I hope you found something useful or illuminating here, and I hope you have a lovely day ahead.
To our journeys,
Brianne
p.s. I’ve got a bunch of draft posts in progress for you, waiting to be finished. Which one should I finish first?