Covid long: Processes of contestation and stabilisation of an emerging pathology – LONGCOV

LongCov will study the emergence and recognition of a new disease entity, long covid, under direct pressure of patients and with their active participation. While long covid is widely recognized as a major public health problem, the precise boundaries of this condition are difficult to stabilize, as are issues such as patients’ right to specialized treatments, remunerated leave of absence, or the recognition of long covid as a professional disease.
Our study, which includes patients as co-researchers, will follow in real-time potential obstacles to the stabilization of this new nosological entity, in a context of uncertainty. Our hypothesis is that obstacles to the full recognition of long covid by clinicians and public health authorities reflect a difficulty in contemporary medicine to identify "functional diseases", based essentially on symptoms and therefore, above all, on patients’ discourse. Such conditions, more frequent in women are perceived by some physicians as mainly "psychosomatic" and therefore tend to be minimized. Our research will contribute to a better understanding of the ways medicine and society deal with these complex pathologies that are source of major suffering for many people.
The LongCov team will combine sociological, historical, epistemological, sociological, legal and ethical approaches to examine the status and evolution of this nosological entity and the conflicts that its recognition may generate between stakeholders. The question of the stabilization of the Covid long entity is at the same time practical and ethical, since the material organization of care becomes much more complicated when a given pathological condition has no well-defined symptomatic basis, is not based on reliable diagnostic tests, and when care meets resistance and skepticism. A study of the stabilization – or not – of "long Covid," conducted by a multidisciplinary team asks, besides its obvious intrinsic interest, fundamental epistemological questions about the evolution of contemporary medicine.