Tens of millions of people around the world suffer from long COVID, millions more struggle with the aftermath of other viruses, and conventional medicine has no cure for any of them. But doctors at fasting clinics in Europe and the United States have recently reported in peer-reviewed journals that when their patients with long COVID fasted for several days, their fatigue, brain fog, muscle pains, headaches, and other symptoms reversed. In many cases, the long COVID seems to have been entirely eliminated.

In this urgent, in-depth essay, Steve Hendricks, one of the world’s foremost journalists of fasting, examines these promising cases of recovery and explores the science of how fasting might reverse long COVID and other post-viral syndromes. For Hendricks, the question was not merely academic. As he describes in stark detail, after falling ill with a virus himself, he became bedridden with a post-viral syndrome that relented only when he fasted.

A Cure for Long COVID? is a ray of hope for sufferers of viral fallout, who until now have had little cause for optimism. It’s also a plea to the doctors, scientists, and journalists who for too long have ignored the research that shows fasting can sometimes heal diseases that orthodox medicine is powerless to reverse.