Health & Medicine

How patient-led research could speed up medical innovation

People with understudied chronic conditions are taking up science

Digital art of someone in a hospital gown standing at a line graph full of data points with other images such as lungs, chemical makeup and bell curves around the person.

Suffers of long COVID, ME/CFS and other chronic conditions are taking medical research into their own hands.

Pete Ryan

By Betsy Ladyzhets

Melissa Red Hoffman was “feeling really stuck” last summer. A 50-year-old surgeon in Asheville, N.C., Hoffman had been struggling with long COVID since getting infected with the coronavirus two and a half years earlier. “Deafening fatigue” was one of her worst symptoms, she says. “I feel tired behind my eyes from the moment I get up to the moment I go to sleep.”