Guidelines for Patient-Practitioner Contact and TCM Management in Post-COVID Syndromes

COVID-19 is an infectious disease that has been spreading throughout the world since the beginning of 2020, becoming a pandemic. As reported by the World Health Organisation (WHO), by 10th January 2021 the disease had spread to more than 200 countries, infecting more than 88 million people and claiming nearly two million lives. These figures are increasing daily. In the UK at the time of going to print, there have been more than three million cases, more than 80 thousand confirmed deaths and more than 50 thousand people are infected daily. With such a large number of cases, post-COVID syndromes are also emerging, where patients who recover from the disease - with or without undergoing medical treatment - still suffer symptoms, some of which are serious and could affect them for the rest of their lives. Traditional Chinese medicine can offer significant help. In this article I discuss some of the presentations of post-COVID syndrome that I have treated: reduced lung function, gastrointestinal tract dysfunction, psychiatric disorders, post-viral chronic fatigue syndrome and chronic inflammation of the sexual organs; I describe how they were managed with Chinese herbal medicine alone, as the cases were seen during the first UK lockdown when clinics had to close to face-to-face consultations. Traditional Chinese medicine, whenever possible with the full spectrum of its treating modalities, can play an important role in the treatment of post-COVID syndromes.