There's no specific drug to treat long COVID yet. But as long COVID clinics have sprout up across the country, there are more and more options for patients who deal with lingering, but life-altering symptoms.
“I would cough nonstop to the point that I couldn’t catch my breath,” says Saulino, who lives in Hilliard, OH.
She assumed the cough would improve, but it didn’t, until her symptoms worsened and she ended up in the emergency room in early December, convinced she was having a“They told me that it was due to inflamed muscles, that there was nothing they could do, and that this was my new ‘normal,’” she says. “I burst into tears. No one wants to live this way.”
Saulino contacted the Post-COVID Recovery Program at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. At her first visit in December, she met with awho told her she had gotten asthma after her bout with COVID. After 5 weeks on the twice-daily maintenance inhaler beclomethasone , her symptoms were gone. In fact, the only time she gets an asthma flare now is if she has a cold.
Saulino says that she feels back to herself again, including having the energy to get her 18-year-old quadruplets off to college this fall. “But if I hadn’t been persistent, and sought out treatment, I’d probably still be incredibly debilitated,” she says.find a solution that works so well, or so quickly. But as long COVID clinics have sprouted up across the country, there are more and more options for patients who deal with lingering, but life-altering symptoms.
“It can be challenging for doctors to treat, since many people undergo extensive testing which doesn’t turn up anything abnormal,” says David Putrino, PhD, director of rehabilitation innovation at the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. “But their symptoms are very real.”