Paul Garner

Summary

At seven months post-infection he was connected with a Norwegian psychology PhD candidate who had recovered from post-viral fatigue and taught him that unconscious defence mechanisms were generating false fatigue alarms, and that he could retrain his bodily reactions through conscious thoughts, feelings, and behaviour. The approach, unnamed as any branded program, involved stopping symptom-monitoring, quitting illness-focused social media and patient groups, deliberately seeking joy and humour, confronting his fear of exercise, and starting graded physical activity on a bicycle; no drugs or supplements are named. A professor of tropical medicine, he had been so unwell with COVID-19 that he 'thought I was dying,' was unable to be out of bed more than three hours at a stretch by three months, and endured brain fog, joint pain, breathlessness, dizziness, and limbs he described as 'permanently fizzing' for about seven months. Within two weeks of starting the retraining approach he completed an hour of military-fitness training, and after a couple of months he calls himself 'overjoyed' and states plainly, 'I have recovered.' He describes one relapse trigger, a bout of dengue fever that briefly brought fatigue symptoms back, which he says he overcame quickly by applying the same principles again; no ongoing maintenance routine is described.

What they credit

Credits CBT & mindset, Brain retraining, Graded exercise, .

Symptoms mentioned

Symptoms: Brain fog, Breathlessness, Pain & fibromyalgia.