Two Minds Blog

The COVID-19 pandemic might be finally winding down as the U.S. population approaches the point of herd immunity, but many areas of the country are again struggling with decisions about public health strategies like mask and vaccination mandates. A recent  Medscape article  asked the question “who are the real COVID experts?” This is relevant again as we move into a new “endemic” phase that involves neither height-of-the-pandemic lockdowns nor a clear victory over the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Usually, the experts on an infectious disease would consist of immunologists, virologists, or infectious disease physicians. But in the case of COVID-19 the issues are much more complicated than just viral transmission and treatment. We need chronic disease experts to help us understand the symptoms and treatments of Long COVID syndrome. We need mental health experts to help us process the collective trauma that many people have experienced over the past 2 years. We need economists to help us understan

  Exercise is usually seen as a way to strengthen the body or prevent disease, but it actually fits the model of complementary and alternative medicine treatments (CAM). In the past some students have reacted negatively to my characterization of exercise as a form of CAM, thinking that perhaps “complementary” meant “less good than,” and I acknowledge that in some medical care settings the term does have this meaning. Here is my reason for thinking of exercise in this way: Exercise is different from other medical interventions because it involves the patient  doing some activity  rather than having something  done to  them. Even more fundamentally, it differs in that it is intended to produce broad changes in functioning rather than more constrained or system-specific ones. Besides being a source for a broad spectrum of changes, exercise is also a  behavior  that people may or may not engage in. Exercise is therefore often seen as the dependent variable in psychological intervention stu