Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to conversations with all of us. The show that explores the evolving world of health research and the role we can have in creating a healthier future for generations to come. I'm your host Cheryl McLeod, community engagement and communications manager for all of us New England at Boston Medical center.
Today we're shining a spotlight on a reality that's emerged amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Long COVID joining me are Doctor Cheryl Clark, Misha McRae and Jackie Lindsay. Welcome to you all.
Long COVID has become a topic of intense concern across the world. For many, the symptoms of COVID-19 continued long after the initial infection, lasting weeks, months or even years. It's a complex condition that affects each person differently. I'm excited to introduce our guests for this episode, Doctor Cheryl Clark, Nisha McCray and Jackie Lindsay. They'll shed light on what long COVID entails, how it impacts daily life, and the inspiring collaborative efforts within communities to raise awareness and provide support. Joining us for the second time is Doctor Cheryl Clark. Doctor Clark is a clinician, researcher and educator at Brigham and Women's Hospital and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Doctor Clark serves as associate chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care. She's dedicated her career to the connection between the social environment and disease risks, including topics such as safety in neighborhoods and stressors due to a legacy of structural racism in the US. Jackie Lindsey is founder of Innovation by Design, an organizational development consulting firm that that specializes in strategy, innovation and leadership development. She also leads the Boston COVID Recovery cohort. She's committed to the development of a world that's enriched by what diverse groups of people produce when they are supported to think and learn together, discover common ground, and work together to create the future they want. Nisha McRae, a longtime Boston resident, is the executive director of Bajika, a nonprofit organization born out of MIT. After getting COVID-19 in March 2020, she channeled her experience with long COVID and science communications expertise into national advocacy efforts. So let's dive in. What are the symptoms of long COVID and how do they manifest over time? Is long COVID often confused with other conditions? Cheryl Clark, why don't we start with you and then anyone else wants to jump in.
[00:02:38] Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me. This is just such an important topic and I do think that it has been hard for people who have long COVID and for the clinicians that are trying to take care of people with long COVID because the symptoms are so varied. The technical term is multi system disease. And what that means is that long COVID has so many different impacts on the body. It causes, or at least is associated with symptoms that affect the brain. Almost like brain fog, where you just kind of feel the sense of confusion. It can affect the lungs, where people have difficulty breathing. It can affect the heart and the circulatory system, where people can actually develop blood clots and things like that cause difficulties with the circulations to the lung. So it has impacts on so many different parts of the body, they can be really difficult to diagnose. And so you really have to make sure that you're alert and aware to the fact that if something's happening to you and you really can't explain it, you've had COVID that you don't just sort of say, well, you know, not sure what's going on and just deal with it, but that you go and see your clinician and talk about the symptoms that you have, because you can get a diagnosis, but sometimes it takes conversation.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: Some of these symptoms you're describing, it could be flu. Right? So are you thinking that if people have flu symptoms that stay along, how do you tell? At what point do you need to go in and get it checked? Because people just say it's flu. I'll just wait.
[00:04:08] Speaker B: I think anytime that you're worried, you should go and see your doctor. But long COVID tends to be diagnosed 30 days or more after you've had what we call the acute or the fresh infection. With COVID it can happen at any time. But if it's been about a month and your symptoms really just haven't gone away, or you're noticing that you're developing new symptoms. So pain in the leg or just fatigue that gets worse when you try to exercise, that you just can't get rid of, trouble breathing, brain fog, where you're just feeling confused, those sorts of things should send you to your doctor.
[00:04:46] Speaker A: And that's different from actually having acute COVID because all of this happens after your COVID is testing negative. I'm not a doctor, so I'm trying to understand that. Is that right?
[00:04:56] Speaker C: Really?
[00:04:56] Speaker B: Well said. It can happen at any time. But when we talk about long COVID, we think about that as being symptoms that happen 30 days or more after you first get infected with the coronavirus. The symptoms of the first infection of coronavirus do seem very much like the flu, right, where you, you know, feel like flu symptoms, you might have a fever, you might have trouble breathing, you might have muscle aches, those sorts of things. And some people actually don't really have any symptoms at all of coronavirus, which can also be tricky. But if you know you had coronavirus or COVID 30 days after you get that diagnosis, if you start to notice new symptoms or that the symptoms you had haven't gone away, then you need to see your doctor for an evaluation.
[00:05:45] Speaker A: Nisha, I would love to hear about your experience. Did you think it was something other than long? COVID, tell us about your journey.
[00:05:51] Speaker C: I would love to. Cheryl. I think for me, I was even caught unawares. And I have a family who's primarily in healthcare. And because I had a family in healthcare, I was on alert because I was looking for anything that told me I had a coronavirus infection. Because this was back in spring 2020, I hadn't known anybody. We didn't really know what the symptoms would look like beyond the case examples we were hearing on the news. And I knew from my family's experience that certain illnesses look different amongst different people. So depending on your background, your gender, your previous health history, there may be different symptoms. So when I first got COVID in late March, early April of 2020, at first I thought it was simply exhaustion or burnout from the stress of switching from in person to hybrid to virtual with my team and my organization. And I simply said, let me just give it a couple of days rest. Maybe that's what I need. Let me take a couple of days off. It's just my body reacting to everything going on. But it was not till the third day I was feeling that extreme exhaustion. And I heard my partner cough in the other room. And I was starting to have the chest pain, the difficulty breathing, the racing heartbeat, and pretty much having dizziness. Whenever I would go up a flight of stairs or even walk across the room, did I start to go. I've been burned out in stress before. This isn't burnout. And unfortunately for me at the time, testing was very difficult to get a hold of. But eventually I was able to get a COVID test and to discover that, yes, I did have a COVID-19 infection. However, by that point, I was pretty much in the throes of long COVID because we were weeks posting initial infection. And I started to realize, as Doctor Clark said, just because your initial symptoms during the acute COVID infection are one thing, does that mean you won't develop new ones or those won't go away or what we call waxing and waning just like the moon, if we want to take it back to science, that sometimes you'll have the original symptoms you have during the acute stage, and then sometimes 36, 12, 15 months post, you can have new actual symptoms develop. And what I say, what threw me for a loop initially in my medical team was how multisystemic my infection and post acute infection was, because they were trying to play a game of whack a mole with me. They were thinking there was something neurological happening. And then they went, oh, wait, what's going on over here in cardiovascular. Wait, what's. What's happening over here in pulmonary? Oh, my God. She has autonomic issues. Like, why are all these things popping up? So when I say it's very difficult, even on the patient side, even I was going, do I have multiple things wrong? Do I have a parasite? And I caught COVID, and something else happened, and I happened to go through aging. Why all of this at the same time? So for me, it is very difficult. But that's why we're now seeing the long COVID definition develop in such a way that it allows for that flexibility and that range. For the medical team to be able to identify the cause and effect may not be so clear cut as it was for me, because I was in isolation, we were in lockdown. I wasn't around anybody. They could test my partner and go, if he doesn't have it, but she has it, he most likely has it. He's not showing up on a test. Now, we can allow ourselves the amount of time to recognize that there is some type of acute illness that's affecting millions of Americans.
[00:09:13] Speaker A: Doctor Clark, could you please tell me if someone has long COVID and they're in the middle of having symptoms, can they pass COVID back to somebody else?
[00:09:22] Speaker B: That's a really great question, Cheryl. And I think it's important to emphasize, too, everyone that long COVID is not the part of COVID that you pass on to other people. It's interesting because we do think that there may be a part of the symptoms that would occur because you haven't finished clearing the virus from the body. But for the most part, you cannot give long COVID to other people. So people don't have to be worried about being near you or being around you and supporting you. If you have long COVID, you're not going to give it to anyone. The way that coronavirus or COVID, the early part of the infection, is a state where you can give it to other people. So really, really important to emphasize the definition of COVID versus long COVID, the really early part of it is an infection. You give it to other people, possibly for many of us, the majority of us, it goes away. But long COVID, that after 30 days, you still have symptoms. They affect multiple parts of the body, but you aren't able to give that to other people. So really important question.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: Nisha, could you tell me when they finally told you, this is long COVID, and then would you tell us about your reaction?
[00:10:44] Speaker C: I was part of what we call the OGS, or the original long haulers, in the sense that we were starting to hear reports that there were some people who just never recovered from COVID as early as June of 2020. And Ed Young in the Atlantic wrote about these mysterious long haulers, people who COVID wasn't going away in a week or two, but it seemed to be lasting months. And that was the first time I realized that it wasn't. I was some medical marvel or mystery that this could be a possible explanation. However, it took a lot longer for us to realize this was probably the actual reason, because for us, we were like, well, I could be having lupus. I could be having some kind of autoimmune disease. Let's do some more blood testing. Let's do some more tests in order to rule out any other diseases or syndromes that she may be experiencing before we go into these mysterious, unmarked territory of long COVID. And while I'm happy my team did that, it took approximately 18 months before they actually were able to put in my medical sheet. Oh, it seems she's suffering from post acute COVID. And that amount of time is a lot when you are unable to function as your true self. And what I mean by that is you're taking time off of work. You're trying to figure out how to reorganize your life around these new, debilitating symptoms that can leave you incapacitated for hours at a time. And while, yes, you need to dot your I's and cross your t's, our world does not operate on dotting your I's and crossing your t's and providing you that time to do so. I'm very privileged in that I was able to gather around my community, and they were able to support me and make sure I had the flexibility and freedom necessary. But that's not actually the case for most Americans. And so while my journey was 18 months, and I'm starting to hear, finally, some people's journeys are shortening, and they're getting diagnosed within three to six months. That's still a long time to not know what are the next steps and how to cope, because a lot of these symptoms are debilitating, to the point that if you met long COVID patients, especially moderate to severe ones, you would make them a candidate for a nursing home or assisted living facility.
[00:12:59] Speaker D: Wow.
[00:13:00] Speaker A: Thank you so much for sharing that. I know that that's very hard, and it brings me to my next question. But you talked about community, and that's for Jackie. Jackie, could you tell us what the Boston COVID recovery cohort and why it was created?
[00:13:15] Speaker D: It was really created in response to NIH's call to communities across the country to participate in a four year research study to try to understand what long COVID is, how it operates, who it impacts, and essentially how to develop both treatments and prevention of it. And so the Boston COVID recovery cohort was essentially originally created to really be the outreach arm. Reach out, make sure that the research study involved people from our diverse communities and wasn't just normed against the white population. But when we were created and we were intentional about meeting with different communities across the greater Boston area to introduce the project, find out who might be interested in joining us, we also used that opportunity to learn from them. And what came out of that was a mission to really center community leadership and social justice and focus on equity in the recovery from long COVID. And so those values led the people that we brought together who decided to form a community partnership table made up of community members, health system partners, and equity partners. It led them to create four key priorities to drive the work. The first priority was to make sure that the study pool for recover reflected the diversity of our community, because we hadn't seen that before, and we thought that was essential. The second, it's about educating the broader community about long COVID, because most people with it, most people with family members and community members with it didn't even know they had it. So they were just slogging through. People were saying, we need to educate our community, not just about long COVID, but about the critical importance of addressing systemic racism and advancing health equity, because that's the unaddressed inequities are the underlying condition that especially make black and Latinx communities and Native Americans and the LGBTQIA community and immigrants and the disability community. All these key segments are very vulnerable to long COVID because their underlying health is not solid. They're experiencing longstanding inequities, and it just, when long COVID or any other disease, infectious or otherwise, comes around, these are the communities that are hardest hit. And the third thing they said we've got to be doing is we've got to provide effective and equitable clinical care and social supports. You could hear that again, Anisha story. People come in just debilitated by this disease and multisystem disease, and they need all kinds of social supports, which in the technical term is often referred to as the social determinants of health. And that just simply refers to other systems beyond healthcare that impact the health of our community. That could be education, it could be jobs, it could be housing, it could be childcare, all the things that people need to have and sustain a quality of life. And then the last thing they said, because of the longstanding issues around racial inequity, they said, we have got to advance advocacy for both policy and institutional support, to advance health equity and really build anti racist organizations. Because if we just keep looking at long COVID or any other disease as just this thing that's sitting on top of a foundation that is just riddled with inequities, we're not going to make much headway, and especially with the same populations that get hit by everything else. So that's why BCRC was founded.
[00:17:17] Speaker A: How did you get community members and organizations to be a part of BCRC? And can you share a bit more about the community education forum series?
[00:17:26] Speaker D: Once we got the news from NIH that Greater Boston had been selected to participate in the recover program, that's the name of it, by NIH. What we did was held convenings with community organizations and members from all over our community.
We did something very intentional. Number one, we put out the word across our community that we wanted to meet with everybody, and we invited people to our convenings, whoever could come. And we decided to keep a very open door policy as we were holding these convenings, as we then brought everybody together who'd come to the convenings and shared the results of what we'd learned as we invited people to set the mission for BCRC, as well as to set the priorities for BCRC. And when they told us, you have got to launch this community education forum series, again, we keep our doors open to everybody. So it isn't until now that we're now talking about membership, as in people actually sign up to be a part of ongoing membership. Because one of the things that we saw is that people were cycling in and out of different meetings, and people would show up when there was something that really addressed their needs. And rather than just have at that point a specific group of members, what we wanted to do was to keep everything open to our communities. And there was another reason we chose to do that is that we were trying to build relationships and trust. And so what we chose to do was use our community education forum series as a major platform for not just educating our community, but engaging and beginning to organize our community. And I'll tell you what I mean by that, is that. So we launched our community education forum series last year, 2023. We made sure that each of our community education forums addressed one of the top priorities. So our first forum, for example, focused on how long COVID is impacting two of the hardest hit communities in greater Boston, Black and Latinx. Nobody had done research on that. We did, and we showcased it at our forum. The second forum tied to our goal around providing effective, equitable clinical care. We brought practitioners in, long COVID, clinic director, a key person from the Boston Health Commission, other people, and a panel coming from the community, talking about the long COVID clinical care and support we have. But they also talk quite candidly about what we don't have and what we need.
And the core thing that came out of that was we didn't have, in the state or around the country, the data infrastructure to know how many people were being impacted by it, especially by race and ethnic groups who's been hardest hit. We didn't even have the infrastructure in the country to be able to. How are you going to provide effective and equitable clinical care and social support if you don't have the data to support it? So they were saying, quite candidly, we need investment in the data infrastructure so that we can get the investment we need in the long COVID clinical care and social support infrastructure. Otherwise, we're just whistling Dixie. And so we held that forum. Then the third forum, based on everything we've been hearing from our community. We held a forum on something we heard nobody talking about, which is the community's hardest hit, period, by long COVID, and by everything else, experienced tremendous amounts of loss, loss of life, loss of well being, family members, loss of income, and nobody was acknowledging that loss.
And we wanted to bring in someone who could talk about that loss and talk about his understanding of how that loss could be engaged and supported and transformed into healing, resilience and movement building. We brought in John Powell from the othering and belonging institute, who talked about that, and people were blown away by it.
[00:22:19] Speaker A: The COVID recovery cohort is doing a weighty, amazing, amazing job. But you mentioned something that I really want to follow up on with Doctor Clark. You mentioned the research wasn't there. Doctor Clark, could you talk to me a little bit about what is the research going on with long COVID? I do know all of us has been doing some work around that, but research in general, absolutely.
[00:22:44] Speaker B: And so I would say that there are several efforts that it makes sense to be aware of.
One organization, the national Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and medicine, has organized a group to try to define what on earth is long COVID. You've heard us talk about it, but part of what makes it really difficult for a medical community to get their arms around a new condition is that there have to be some standards. We have to have some agreement around what we think long COVID is. And so the national Academies of science, sciences, engineering, and medicine have convened a working group to try to help us get our arms around it, to figure out what are the conditions, you know, what are the symptoms that help you even to define what is long COVID. And the National Institutes of Health, one of the fundamental ways that health research is funded and conducted in the United States, has funded the recover studies. And there are a couple of these. The recovery studies have tried to interview and understand and collect material like blood samples and imaging tests to try to just get more documentation of what people who have long COVID are going through and how that differs from people who don't have long COVID or who haven't even been infected, for example. So the NIH recover studies, it's called observation. They've observational studies to try to understand what is this condition. And now NIH recover is moving into a clinical trial phase. And what that means is that now that we all have a better sense of what long COVID is, what are the kinds of symptoms that contribute to illness, how do we start to address them? How do we start to develop treatments that are directed toward long COVID symptoms? The clinical trial phase to look at promising medications and treatments has begun. And so those are some of the things that are happening right now in the research phase, moving and doing that initial critical work to understand what the disease is and how to define it, and then moving toward the kinds of trials that need to happen to figure out how to treat it.
[00:25:05] Speaker A: And are they looking at a diverse representation? You know, the kind of communities that Jackie listed?
[00:25:12] Speaker B: It will be so important to make sure that that is the case. As we know, the COVID pandemic affected so many different communities and disproportionately impacted communities that identify as being Black or African American, that identify as being Latina, also disproportionately affected communities that identify as having disabilities. And so it's really important to make sure that the trials also reflect, you know, that diversity. What I would say is that good news is that the locations of the trials are in very diverse places across the country, so not just located in any particular state. And I think that will help make sure that a broad swath of the country are able to get invited to participate and that the results of those trials will be applicable to a broad swath of the population.
[00:26:12] Speaker A: You can check out the organizations that Doctor Clark mentioned in the links in our episode description. I would also like to note that the all of us research program has a few research projects underway using all of us data that are focused on long COVID, including a project by a research fellow at Mass General Hospital. These project links are also listed in our description. Misha, your story is so intense and amazing, and I wondered if you would mind sharing if your life has been like now, because people are going to listen to this, going to want to know how you doing.
[00:26:44] Speaker C: Well, thank you. I like to say that now that I have a diagnosis and my treatment team has figured out, okay, let's manage the symptoms that she's going through. I've made a complete 180. I've actually returned to full time work. I'm actually in my workspace right now with my students working so diligently and being so patient while I'm on this podcast interview. So thank you all so much and me being able to share my story and what I've been through with others who are now going through potentially long COVID. Because for me, myself, and for my medical team now looks to me as an example. Case study of, hey, I have a patient. Did you go through this? What did you do? What methods did you utilize? Did this treatment that we put you on, did it have any adverse side effects? How can we help other people now that we know that some resemblance or some level of recovery is possible? And I think that's what gives me so much hope. So to let everyone know that whether or not I am having a moment where my symptoms have just remitted a bit and I may have a relapse, I don't know. But I'm currently living in the moment and trying to use my new platform and ability to make sure that those who don't have a voice, whether because they are now relegated to their rooms or their homes, because they are suffering from debilitating symptoms, or whether or not because we've never looked to them as voices we care to listen to or hear, make sure that everyone understands what this is and that you are able to prevent infection by taking a swiss cheese method of protection. And what I mean by that is making sure you work in ventilated spaces. Don't go into overcrowded spaces wearing a mask. If you're sick, stay home. If someone else is sick, keep your distance from them. These are all things that I hope people will hear in order to make sure that if your first COVID infection didn't lead to long COVID, that doesn't mean your 2nd, third, and beyond won't.
[00:28:42] Speaker A: I love the practicality of your comments and your suggestions.
[00:28:46] Speaker D: Thank you.
[00:28:47] Speaker A: Cause I think it's gonna be very helpful for people listening. But it brings me to another question for Doctor Clark. Doctor Clark, there are people out there listening who think, well, I've been vaccinated, so I don't have to worry about long COVID. Would you sort of explain to people what the vaccine does and doesn't do and who is at risk for long COVID, as far as science knows now?
[00:29:10] Speaker B: Absolutely. I think you raised two really important points and why it's still very important to get the vaccine. What I would say is that the vaccine is really important for making sure that you don't get extremely sick from coronavirus. So it can prevent the infection, but it can also make sure that if you do get the infection, that it's not severe. And it also will reduce the likelihood that you develop these symptoms in some ways, because it does prevent you from getting very sick with the infection. So very important to get the vaccine and want to make sure that that's still a part of what we communicate when we think about coronavirus infection. I think it is very difficult to tell at this point who's at risk of having long COVID symptoms. In many ways, that is part of what the NIH recover studies and other groups are looking to try to understand better, is, you know, what puts you at risk. What I would say, and I wanted to elevate something that nisha mentioned, is that part of what you need to do is if you have underlying conditions, going to your primary care doctor can be helpful, because treating those underlying conditions is going to help in terms of, if nothing else, in terms of making sure that you protect your health. So if you have diabetes, if you have heart disease and you also have long COVID, treating those other underlying conditions is going to help you in terms of your overall symptom management. So very important to get the vaccine. Also very important to see your doctor to get those underlying conditions taken care of.
[00:31:03] Speaker A: Jackie, can you tell me what work still needs to be done in order for the Boston COVID recovery cohort to achieve its mission.
[00:31:11] Speaker D: I think one of the greatest challenges that we're facing is the invisibility of this disease that in spite of everything that we've been talking about, there's still too many people, ordinary people, across sectors, across cultures, but also primary care providers themselves. There's still too many people who really don't know what long COVID is, how to address it. And frankly, what we see building up in the broader population is a lot of fatigue.
With COVID and long COVID as something that grows out of it, a fatigue. People want to put it in their rearview mirror because it was so debilitating. People want to get back to social interaction. They want to, in fact, let go of all the precautions that Nisha was just describing. And because there still isn't consensus, there still isn't a confirmed clinical diagnosis for long COVID, they're symptom clusters, and that's what recover is doing more research on, but getting agreement about not only what it is, but how to diagnose it, what kind of support is needed. All of those things need to be built. And the reason I want to underscore what Nisha is saying, I think at this point, one, we're going to start, we need to connect the dots between the research, the clinical practice, and the advocacy that's needed for policy and systems change in order to improve the healthcare and health of our communities. And I think the other thing we have to do, and we'll just say this, none of these policies, none of these institutions are going to change without the community, the diverse community coming together and pushing for those change. That's the only thing that is strong enough to overcome the institutional and policy resistance that holds on to the status quo. And but I think both what you guys are doing today and what Nisha put her finger on, it, is our ability to get the stories out, not only of individuals, but to tell a more powerful story about what's happening in our society as a result of not addressing this and who's impacting it, who's being impacted by it, and what we need to do instead and need to do together. So that even the title of what you're about, all of us, this is a disease that actually affects all of us, but most people don't know it yet. We need to tell a story that gets that out, that penetrates the public's consciousness, and that gets them to care about it so that they respond and we can change the behavior of our institutions and our public policies and invest in building the data infrastructure and the clinical care infrastructure and the equity infrastructure that we need to provide effective and equitable clinical care and social supports to people who are living with it and maybe living with it for years, if not the rest of their lives.
[00:34:40] Speaker A: So I'm going to start with Nisha, and then I'll go to Jackie, and then you, Doctor Clark, what is the one takeaway you'd like people listening to this podcast to have?
[00:34:50] Speaker C: I would say for me is that long COVID is not in indictment regarding somebody's past behavior or lifestyle, where they live, who they love, and who they gather around. And what I mean by that is, so often I'm in conversations, regardless of what the actual background, whether their age, their profession, their community.
There's almost a sense of, you must have done something in order to get long COVID, like you didn't practice a healthy diet, you didn't exercise, you didn't do all of the things to avoid this. And I want us to get out of that mindset that long COVID, from my perspective, as someone who's been around and seen four years of this, seems to affect everyone from every walk of life, whether or not they're religiously affiliated with an institution and walk and those straightest of arrows in terms of the way they live their life, to those who may not have made the decisions that we, as society, approve of. And so to feel that one is superior and that this cannot affect them or their loved ones or their community, I would like you to take a step back and realize that regardless of if it affects five to 20% of your community, it affects your community. And as a member of such a community, it is your responsibility to participate, support, and understand what's affecting your community members. In order for all of us to actually get to a point, that is no longer the enormous challenge we face right now. We are currently looking at a challenge that both sides of the political spectrum, during an election year, find as a huge challenge to our society and are putting forth legislation in order to do, as Jackie mentioned, support the research, support the infrastructure, and tell that story. And so for me, I want everyone to realize that it may not affect you, but you still need to understand it and learn about it for the sake of being a member of this society and this community.
[00:36:59] Speaker D: I have nothing to add to that. Spot on.
[00:37:03] Speaker A: Bravo, Doctor Clark. Email.
[00:37:06] Speaker B: Let me have the last word on that.
[00:37:08] Speaker A: Absolutely wonderful.
Thank you for listening to conversations with all of us. I'm your host, Cheryl McLeod, and thank you to our guests, doctor Cheryl Clark, Jackie Lindsay, and Nisha McRae. If you like this episode and you want to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, hit the subscribe button, or leave a rating in review. That's all for this episode, folks. We'll see you next time.
Conversations with all of us is brought to you by the all of us research program in New England. All of us is an initiative from the National Institutes of Health and Master Brigham, a leading integrated healthcare system in New England, and Boston Medical center, an academic medical center with a deep commitment to clinical excellence and health equity, are working together with the all of us research program to help researchers understand more about why people get sick or stay healthy. Medical research hasn't always included everyone. This is why medical research has gender, racial, and age gaps. The all of us research program is working with Mass. General, Brigham, and Boston Medical center to change this, and you can help us close these gaps and receive 25 when you complete the steps to enroll. So join all of us today. To learn more, call 6177-6800 or visit join allofus.org podcastne.
Are you a participant in the all of us research program? By completing your surveys and other new activities, you may be contributing to advancing medical research that works for all of us. So stay connected. Log into your portal today by visiting Join allofus.org, or use the all of us app to complete new surveys. For help, call 617-768-8300 that's 617-768-8300 and thank you for being part of the all of us research program.
