A number of private clinics in Europe (in Cyprus, as well as in Germany, Switzerland, and possibly other countries) are attracting clients from abroad with the promise of curing long-standing symptoms of coronavirus through the method of “blood cleansing”. Medical experts claim that no clinical trials of this therapy have been conducted, and the effectiveness of treating long COVID in this way has not been proven by anyone. However, thousands of medical tourists continue to seek treatment in clinics, hoping for a miraculous recovery. The therapy, I must say, is quite expensive. Some desperate patients have spent all their savings on treatment, and yet their condition has not improved significantly.
The number of offers should remain: In her article, Madlen Davis, Editor of the Investigations Department of the British Medical Journal (BMJ), explains who these people are and in what specific way they have been tried to be treated for post-COVID syndrome (PCOS – the official name for long COVID). She points out that there is still no effective treatment for long COVID, and the syndrome itself is poorly understood. What is known is that in some patients who appear to have recovered from COVID-19, some symptoms of the infection enter a chronic phase that lasts at least 12 weeks.
The technique offered by the clinics is not new and is known in professional circles as “apheresis”. The process involves taking a patient’s own blood and using special equipment to separate it into its components – and then selectively mixing it back together again, as if filtering out some of the contents. As the author of the article notes, apheresis is usually only prescribed for people with incurable lipid disorders, and even then only as a last resort. Davis warns that the effectiveness of this procedure in treating long COVID has not been scientifically proven, while the risks of any surgical intervention in the body are obvious. “The author writes: Apheresis can be accompanied by bleeding, formation of blood clots in the bloodstream, which can lead to infection entering the body, and the substances used in the process can provoke an acute reaction.”
The article tells the stories of several desperate patients, but it details the case of a psychiatric resident from the Netherlands, Gitte Burmiseer, who was driven to despair by long COVID. The chronic fatigue was so severe that it took her several hours to walk from her bedroom to the kitchen. To travel to Cyprus for apheresis and vitamin injections, Gitte spent almost all of her savings – but the exhausting symptoms of chronic COVID-19 did not go away: neither mental fog, nor shortness of breath, nor chest pain. After her illness, she tried to return to work twice, but after the second unsuccessful attempt, she decided to quit.
According to the author of the article, in addition to Cyprus, medical institutions in Germany, Switzerland and Turkey also offer apheresis treatment for long COVID. “Thousands of patients have undergone the procedure at the Lipidzentrum Nordrhein in Germany and claim to be satisfied with the results,” writes Madlen Davis. “Apheresis is said to reduce blood viscosity and improve its delivery to the smallest blood vessels by ‘removing microthrombi.'” However, there are no reliable scientific studies on the subject that prove that apheresis helps to treat PCOS, simply because no clinical trials have been conducted. Proponents, on the other hand, point out that patients with long COVID cannot wait for clinical trials to be completed and remain essentially disabled – and for many patients, the benefits of experimental procedures outweigh the potential risks.