Treating Long COVID with a Multidisciplinary, Symptom-Driven Approach

Announcer:
You’re listening to Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Michele Longo, who’s an Associate Professor of Neurology and the Vice Chair of Outpatient Neurology at Tulane University in Louisiana. She’s also a comprehensive neurologist with a special interest in long COVID. She’ll be discussing management strategies for patients with long COVID. Let’s hear from Dr. Longo now.

Dr. Longo:
The treatment interventions for long COVID are as varied as the symptoms themselves, and that should make sense because many of the treatments are symptomatic. So we don’t have that one medication that takes care of all of the symptoms, and the one-and-done approach does not work for long COVID. A lot of lifestyle modifications could be impactful in helping people cope with some of the symptoms, like fatigue and even some of the breathing symptoms; and I’m talking about when the respiratory symptoms are not due to exacerbation of an underlying respiratory disorder that would be treated with certain medications. I’m talking about those patients that the tests say that there’s not something wrong with their lungs, but they are having problems with breathing. We find that self-administered breathing exercises could be very helpful for those patients. For fatigue, being mindful about conserving energy throughout the day, making sure that other medical issues that can impact your energy level are addressed, and making sure there’s not vitamin deficiencies or sleep disturbances or mood disturbances. So it’s really focused on the symptom, and many of our treatments are interventions that require the support of a multidisciplinary team.

So the multidisciplinary approach is essential to treating long COVID. We spoke previously about how COVID could affect whatever organ in the body it wants, and so that would require the expertise of a lot of different specialties at times; but the team needs to not only have clinicians, physicians, or best practice providers, but also our therapists. The speech therapists, the physical therapists, and the occupational therapists are essential members of our team, and so are our social workers, not just for counseling but also for helping our patients access community resources and for some of them, navigating the pursuit of disability because for some people, long COVID will require them to be on disability, and they may need help with doing that process, so it’s an essential part. I think the access part of the clinic probably needs to be with primary care, but the team is going to require at different times specialists—these clinicians that are across the medical spectrum from physicians, social workers good APPs, PT, OT, and speech therapists.

Announcer:
That was Dr. Michele Longo sharing strategies for managing patients with long COVID. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!