elly brosius

@RemissionBiome R50 + @RenegadeRes volunteer. Disabling ME/CFS+ OI+Long Covid. 💖 physics, pets, mindfulness, metaphors, & medicinal gratitude. Am @CFSnova.

[elly brosius @NovaSupport]

The forget-me-not collective quilt is a venue to highlight the art, lives, and stories of people living with me so they may be more seen and heard. The project enables participants to represent their story of how their lives have been impacted. This graphic tells how to sign up.

[Todd Davenport @sunsopeningband]

I didn't have it on my calendar to do any writing this week. That...changed.

Unscheduled post on the Substack, up now. https://t.co/bpxMEnZgEK

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

The reason we think dandelions are weeds is because of a 1950s marketing campaign.

Dandelions, native to Europe and Asia, were brought to North America in the 1600s by European colonists who grew them deliberately.

Every part is edible. The leaves are a salad green, the flowers were made into wine, and the roots were roasted as a coffee substitute and used medicinally for liver and kidney conditions for thousands of years. They were a kitchen-garden staple well into the 1800s.

The shift happened after World War II, when 2,4-D (originally developed for chemical warfare research) was approved as a residential herbicide. Companies like Scotts built the modern lawn-care industry around the idea that a perfect green lawn meant zero broadleaf plants.

Dandelions, being bright yellow and resistant to mowing, became a visible enemy, and the campaign worked. By the 1970s, "dandelion-free" was synonymous with "well-kept."

They aren't native, but they aren't doing significant ecological harm either. The herbicides used to kill them, on the other hand, kill bees, contaminate groundwater, and have been linked to non-Hodgkin lymphoma in humans.

If you hate dandelions, it's most likely due to a marketing campaign that ran before you were born.

[Danielle Beckman @DaniBeckman]

Hey @WIRED, how about interviewing neuroscientists who are actually studying the brains of people with #LongCovid? I'm available, and so are many others in the field.

"When the brain gets stuck in a feedback loop of fight or flight" What does that even mean? #Pseudoscience

[🌷🦋 Love Music 🎶 & Dance 💃🏻🕺🏻 @Tiana_Celine_23]

Rita Moreno performing "Fever" on the Muppet Show with Animal on drums which originally aired almost 50 years ago in the UK on September 12, 1976 and in New York on September 20, 1976 which earned her a Primetime Emmy Award.

[Lizzy H @hopefullizzy]

Anddd the aftermath (and this is after 3hrs sleep and a few hours resting.) Dammit this illness is something else. Thinking of everyone as they recover from blue Sunday, something we really shouldn’t need to recover from.

[Lizzy H @hopefullizzy]

Was it even Blue Sunday if I didn’t wear my staple blue tshirt 🤣 so weird to see the obvious changes.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A psychologist at the University of North Carolina spent 20 years proving that a single 20-second hug rewires the human cardiovascular system, and the experiment she ran is so simple you can replicate it tonight at home.

Her name is Karen Grewen.

She works inside the UNC School of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry. The paper that made her famous was published in 2003, and almost nobody outside her field has read it.

Here is what she actually did.

She recruited 183 healthy adults living with a long-term partner. She split them into two groups. The warm contact group sat together for 10 minutes holding hands while watching a romantic video. Then they stood up and hugged each other for exactly 20 seconds.

The control group sat alone in a separate room for the same amount of time doing nothing.

Then she made every single one of them give a public speech in front of a panel.

Public speaking is one of the cleanest stressors in psychology. Heart rate spikes. Blood pressure climbs. Cortisol floods the system within minutes. It is the laboratory version of every stressful moment you have ever had at work.

The people who had been hugged for 20 seconds before walking into that room had measurably lower blood pressure responses to the stress. Lower systolic. Lower diastolic. Lower heart rate increases. Everything was the same.. the speech, the panel, and fear. But this time completely different physiological response.

The hug had not made the stress disappear. It had changed how the body was allowed to respond to it.

Two years later Grewen ran the follow-up study that explained why. She drew blood from 38 couples before and after the same warm contact protocol and measured what was actually changing inside them. The answer was a hormone called oxytocin.

Oxytocin is the chemical your body releases during childbirth, breastfeeding, and orgasm. It is the same molecule that makes a mother feel calm holding her newborn.

Grewen's data showed that 20 seconds of physical contact with a trusted partner triggered a measurable spike in plasma oxytocin in both men and women, and the size of that spike directly predicted how much their blood pressure dropped.

The mechanism turned out to be older than recorded history. Oxytocin binds to receptors in your heart, your blood vessels, and the part of your brainstem that controls how aggressively your nervous system reacts to threat.

When the hormone shows up, the entire fight-or-flight machine downshifts. Your blood vessels widen. Your heart slows. Your cortisol production gets suppressed.

This is not a feeling. This is a chemical instruction your body sends to itself that you can measure with a blood pressure cuff.

The detail Grewen kept emphasizing in her interviews was the duration. Three seconds is the average length of a hug between two humans. It is too short.

The hormonal cascade does not have time to start. 20 seconds is the threshold where the oxytocin actually crosses into the bloodstream in a quantity large enough to do something measurable.

A follow-up study tracked 59 premenopausal women over time and found that the ones who hugged their partners most frequently had lower resting blood pressure and higher baseline oxytocin levels than the ones who did not. The effect compounded. Daily hugs produced a permanent shift in the cardiovascular baseline.

A separate review of long-term partner contact research found that married adults with frequent affectionate touch had significantly lower rates of heart disease and all-cause mortality than equally healthy adults without it.

The American Heart Association now cites this body of research when explaining why social isolation is treated as a cardiovascular risk factor on the same level as smoking.

The most haunting line in Grewen's research is one she said in an interview after publishing the second paper. She pointed out that the average American touches another human being less than they did 50 years ago. Phones replaced eye contact. Texts replaced visits. Hugs at the door got shorter.

The thing that used to regulate our cardiovascular system multiple times a day quietly disappeared from most adult lives.

Your body still expects it. The hormone receptors are still there waiting. The system was designed to be reset by physical contact with people who feel safe, and the reset takes 20 seconds.

You can run the experiment yourself tonight. Hug someone you love for 20 full seconds. Count it out. The first 10 will feel awkward. Around 15 something shifts. By 20 the shoulders drop, the breathing slows, the chest opens.

That is not in your head. That is your bloodstream changing.

[Todd Davenport @sunsopeningband]

I just can’t with the constant bothsidesing because it whitewashes what actually happened. The chronic illness community—especially people living with ME/CFS along with their allies and advocates— warned everyone about this from the very jump.

[elly brosius @NovaSupport]

@cin8di @SolidEvidence If you go unmasked, use what you can of an air purifier in every room, fans running, open windows, Astepro nasal spray, MCAS meds that suit you daily, more fans and purifiers, sitting outside. I hope the visit goes well for you.

[elly brosius @NovaSupport]

@cin8di @SolidEvidence Maybe you can unmask outside if there is a breeze/fan? If he has traveled in & been amongst many people it is risky. At ME/CFS event recently, I said one of the key factors of any of my improving in distant and more recent past is how long I can go without any infection.

[Jack | amatica health @JackHadfield14]

Since I got Long COVID, the government cycle has been:

Admit not enough is being done → plan a meeting → meet → say a plan is needed → make half a plan → do none of it or do it bad → repeat.

Just do something already, we don’t want another letter.

[U.S. Surgeon General @Surgeon_General]

Millions of Americans live with infection-associated chronic conditions and illnesses, including long COVID, ME/CFS, and Lyme disease–associated chronic symptoms; conditions that are often debilitating, misunderstood, and under-recognized.

In a new Clinical Infectious Diseases viewpoint, CAPT Iskander and Dr. Haridopolos of the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General call for making these “invisible illnesses” visible through patient-centered care, stronger surveillance, multidisciplinary management, and continued research investment.

The article emphasizes the importance of validating patients’ lived experiences while advancing evidence-informed care to improve outcomes for people living with these complex chronic conditions.

[#MEAction Network @MEActNet]

This #MillionsMissing was powerful.

"Medical Frailty" was our rallying cry to advance research and protect Medicaid. We met with the Acting Chief of Staff to the U.S. Surgeon General, and connected with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

#FrailAndFurious #pwME

[#MEAction Network @MEActNet]

We are excited to announce another collaboration with the Writers Guild Initiative (WGI). We will be offering writing workshops to our community on June 6th, 13th, and 20th. Please apply by the May 22, 2026, deadline: https://t.co/JQKqrKFMXB

#PwME #MECFS #LongCovid

[Andrew McCarthy @AJamesMcCarthy]

I took 1.7 million photos over 6 days to catch this photo of a commercial jet in front of the sun.

The moment it happened, TWO floating prominences were visible, making this not just my best aircraft transit photo, but one of the luckiest of my career! Videos of the transit 👇

[Thomas Gentry @thomasbgentry]

@oasishealthapp Something you can do to wash off those pesticides:

Soak your berries in 10% baking soda water for about 5-10 minutes and gently move them around in the water. Baking soda is extremely safe and will help take some of the residue off.

Thank you, Oasis for bringing awareness 🙏

[Todd Davenport @sunsopeningband]

This raises an important point. We often must use measures governments would recognize from other areas of research because PEM-specific measures are so early in psychometric development. However, fatigue surveys do not have adequate content validity for PEM. #ContentValidityGap

[Antidepressant Content @depressionlesss]

I was trying to get a video of this tiger when a donkey with an awesome smile wanted to be included...

[Chiamaka Nwakalor-Egemba @chef_amakaa]

Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome. Published today in The Lancet after 11 years of research and input from over 22,000 people.
Here is what each word means for us:

Polyendocrine means it is about our hormones. All of them. Not just oestrogen and progesterone.

[Chiamaka Nwakalor-Egemba @chef_amakaa]

We have spent years being told it is “just a period problem” while our skin, our weight, our mood, and our energy were all falling apart. Today, the medical world finally admitted you were right.
PCOS is now PMOS.