Specialized clinics to treat long COVID are in demand and physicians say they can't keep up
CBC
Dr. Neeja Bakshi, an internal medicine physician based in Edmonton, runs a post-COVID clinic out of her private practice to help patients with long COVID.
Since it opened last fall, Bakshi says demand is so high that patients getting referrals now have to wait until November to get their first appointment. She's getting five referrals per day for post-COVID treatment, which is double what her clinic gets for general internal medicine.
She's also getting referrals from other provinces: B.C., Ontario and Manitoba.
"It feels great that I'm providing a service that can help so many people," said Bakshi. "But it's also an incredible pressure because I know that I can't see everybody and I know that I'm not going to be able to provide the care that I want if I'm burnt out."
Doctors say demand is growing for specialized clinics to treat post-COVID condition, also known as long COVID, in part due to increased awareness of what symptoms are. While clinics have opened in a number of locations, the wait lists are also growing. With a lack of funding and staffing, physicians say they can't keep up.
Dr. Kieran Quinn, clinician scientist at Sinai Health and the University of Toronto, is leading a large research program looking at health services for people with post-COVID condition.
Quinn says doctors across the country are starting to see increased volumes of requests for referrals for these specialized clinics.
At the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, run by the University Health Network in Toronto, wait times have recently jumped from weeks to months, he said.
"Our colleagues in different provinces are reporting up to six months wait time to get into these clinics and then around the world, the reported wait times in places like Italy, the U.K. and the United States — these clinics are often seven to nine month wait times," Quinn said.
At Bakshi's long-COVID clinic, patients are first tested for acute infections in their organs and then given a quality-of-life assessment.
"I use that as kind of my starting point to say, where do we want to get to between now and our next visit? And we look at both pharmacotherapy [medication], rehab, allied health, anything that we think that will help this patient," she said.
The clinic, part of Park Integrative Health, has other health professionals on site, such as physiotherapists and dieticians, but Bakshi is the only doctor there that sees long-COVID patients.
She believes the demand is caused by increasing recognition of what post-COVID symptoms are, by health care providers and patients.
"One of the things I'm seeing in the majority of my patients is a high heart rate or something called POTS [postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome]," she said.
A decision over how the provincial government regulates moose hunting in a First Nation's traditional territory now rests with a Manitoba judge, whose ruling will be precedent-setting, lawyers in the case say.
A teenager diagnosed with bird flu in British Columbia is the first domestically acquired human case of H5N1 avian influenza, the Public Health Agency of Canada says.
The Manitoba government made a "political compromise" in its decision to issue a reduced number of moose hunting licences to non-Indigenous hunters in northern parts of the province earlier this year, a lawyer representing a First Nation in the area has argued in court.
If it weren't for a stem cell transplant — less than half a cup of blood from a stranger's umbilical cord — four-year-old Tristan Ford would almost certainly have died as an infant, his parents say.
A Métis saddle from the early 1800s is at the centre of an exhibit that opened last month at a Swiss museum, along with contemporary beadwork created by other Red River Métis artists.
A dome-shaped device floating in Halifax's Northwest Arm could easily be confused with a buoy, but it is actually a contraption meant to turn ocean water into fresh water.
As of Tuesday, there are limits on the number of bottles of spirits a person can buy at the B.C. Liquor store in Tofino, a move that leaders of the Ahousaht First Nation were pushing for.
This story is part of CBC Health's Second Opinion, a weekly analysis of health and medical science news emailed to subscribers on Saturday mornings. If you haven't subscribed yet, you can do that by clicking here.
Mohawk code talkers and their missions were so vital during the Second World War, that some believe without them, there was no way of winning of the war.
Two feisty ferret babies in Virginia are being hailed as a symbol of hope for the future of their species.
On day one of Donald Trump's presidency, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he'll be advising Trump to take fluoride out of public water. The former independent presidential hopeful — and prominent proponent of debunked public health claims — has been told he'll be put in charge of health initiatives in the new Trump administration. He's described fluoride as "industrial waste."