New Research on Long COVID and Fibromyalgia

havent been following it, so this is just about my experiences, but a year and a half ago the rheum who was treating me for fibro, at the clinic that dx'd me, suggested my symptoms + ana were possibly a "post covid lupus like syndrome" and put me on low dose prednisone & hydroxychloroquine. i think i got some relief with it, mostly in the fatigue department. this was before my pots symptoms really got noticeable, and i was taken off both right after they got bad - the new rheum i was seeing after i moved said the old one was a quack, took me off the meds and then told me he didnt intend to keep seeing me and that i'm "just a healthy positive with fibromyalgia". currently have orders for another ana test that i just havent gotten to yet. i never had the suspicion that i had covid, was never diagnosed with it, never even tested positive. but i did have an unidentified viral respiratory illness in autumn 2019 while working at a starbucks (i.e. face to face contact with hundreds of people including various international travelers) so i figure it could maybe have been pre-discovery covid (the drs DID say they didnt know what virus it was) or at least some other sars variant leaving me with those symptoms. but i also had mono as a teen, surgeries as a young adult, and other stuff so god knows what could have caused it. i was fired shortly after and had surgery soon after that, and wasnt back to retail until a year later (which is when i noticed my first symptoms). emotional trauma is also a common element for a lot of chronic pain patients, so its hard to say if physical trauma is necessarily part of it, in my case. at the very least though, i do know someone who started having bad me/cfs symptoms including pots soon after having covid, and me/cfs is fibro adjacent at the very least, so i cant say im surprised or ever really was and i do think there will be a cure for it someday, but no idea if that'll even be in my lifetime. at the very least though, there are enough long covid patients that it's bringing a lot more attention to post-infection chronic illness, meaning a lot more is put into the research for treatment... and there are effective treatments as well, albeit that each has widely varied effectiveness for each patient and there are many, many treatments, not all of which are reasonable, affordable, or worth the side effects

Fibromyalgia is a form of autonomic nervous system dysfunction. Any trauma to the body (physical or emotional) and any serious illness can trigger Fibromyalgia as well as other forms of Dysautonomia. Specifically research is showing a high incidence of post-Covid Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) as well. Personally, I don't believe there will ever be a cure.