“You want to get your life back,” says Linda van Klaveren-Noort. She contracted the crown last January and hasn’t been able to do anything for months. “The first few days I was very sick: very tired, I had a terrible headache and I couldn’t even take a shower anymore. Then you think: it will pass, but it didn’t happen.”
‘I got desperate’
After months of persistent complaints, she was found suffering from post-covid, previously often referred to as pulmonary covid. The general practitioner was seen several times, blood tests were done and physiotherapy started, but nothing helped. “I was only ten percent of what I was, I couldn’t go out anymore, I couldn’t tolerate anyone around me, I was very lonely and I couldn’t even walk dogs anymore. get rid of the dog. “
A visit to the post-covid outpatient clinic in the hospital made her even sadder: even there they couldn’t do anything for her. Partly for this reason, Linda sought solutions herself, and so she came across an ear piercing that could reduce “chronic physical and mental ailments”. On June 14, Linda had the piercing: “Since then I’ve got my life back.”
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Linda isn’t the only one seeking refuge in ear piercing, because at NVS clinic – a company that claims to be the first in the Netherlands to use a specialized tool to put the piercing in the right place – things are gearing up. . .
‘1500 people on the waiting list’
According to owner Richard Jutting, there is currently a six-month waiting list. “More than 1500 people are still waiting for a piercing and the situation is getting more and more crowded. These are people with different complaints, but what is striking is that we are seeing more and more patients with post-covid.”
Ria van der Spek of VNS Daith in Assendelft agrees, she too is putting more and more piercings in the ear of people with post-covid. “They came to me with terrible stories: they lost their partner, they lost their job. I tell them: I can’t give your life back with this, but it could give you more vital energy.”
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What would the piercing do?
The piercing is performed by the vagus nerve of the cranial nerve. This vagus nerve is a nerve that emerges from the brain and goes to the organs of the chest and abdomen. Humans have a left and a right vagus nerve under each collarbone. A branch of the vagus nerve can be found in the ear.
Jutting states with his clinic that if a piercing is inserted through this nerve, the nerve is stimulated. This stimulation is said to be “a great way to allow your body to repair itself and relax”. Jutting states that eighty percent of the people he pierces benefit from the piercing. About twenty percent would feel no effect.
Less sure is Van der Spek: “I have no magic wands in my hands and therefore I never guarantee it will work. It can be a push in the right direction, a push in your process. But you can also be very unlucky and take advantage of it.”
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Yet there are also other sounds to be heard about piercing, which is also and especially done in people with migraines. For example, Gisela Terwindt, a neurologist and headache specialist at Leiden University Medical Center, says there is “absolutely no evidence” for the effect of such a piercing. “It’s not a crazy idea that the vagus nerve could be a starting point for treating attack-related brain diseases such as migraines. But good research hasn’t been done on this yet,” Terwindt tells RTL Nieuws. . “So I don’t think pitting a hole in this would help. If it were that simple, I wouldn’t have researched migraines for thirty years.”
‘This is quackery’
Terwindt then calls it ‘quackery’: “They heard the bell ring, but they don’t know where the clapper is. That part of the ear is an interesting place, but there is no chance that it will help. And dangerous that it is false. they create expectations among people looking for solutions. Apparently these clinics have a lot of persuasiveness, but most of all a lot of placebo effects. If you say that something works so well, you have to be able to prove it in an orderly way, and they can’t. “
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Alfons Olde Loohuis, C-support’s medical consultant, also “certainly wouldn’t advise” patients to have such a piercing done due to lack of evidence of its effectiveness. But he also thinks the vagus nerve may play a role in treating diseases in the future. “This nerve has a very important function in dysautonomia – the malfunction of the autonomic nervous system – as happens in many post-covid patients.”
“Looking at the role of this nerve and its possibilities for post-covid patients in a real-world study setting would therefore not be a bad idea. Because right now a jungle of insane cures has arisen and this falls into that.”
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Post-covid patient Linda also knows the critical voices, but swears by the piercing. “What if it had a placebo effect? Then I would say: then it works too? I don’t assume it, and neither do the people in my environment. They saw me change, my life has come out nowhere back I have not done any therapy, suddenly I have not I have more fever and am awake and running from morning till night and I can walk the dogs again, I’m so glad I still have both of them. “
Not everyone complains for free
Post-covid patient Marianne Bouma doesn’t experience as much improvement as Linda did after the piercing. She also had the piercing done to get her life back after a corona infection she was treating a year ago, but unfortunately she still has many complaints. “But the sharp edges are gone,” she says.
Marianne still suffers from overstimulation every day and always sleeps badly, despite the piercing. Yet she is happy, because she is less bothered by the stimuli than she was before the piercing and she is even resuming the number of working hours. “I can go in big groups again, my husband really sees a different person now that I have the piercing. But of course you never know if the piercing actually caused this or if it was just time that made me better.”
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