Results
The study was conducted with a total of 185 volunteer participants, and 117 of them were male (63%) and 68 (37%) were female. The average age of the patients was 55±18.3 (female: 52.7±18.5, male: 56.3±17.5). Overall treatment durations were mostly between 7-10 days for both sexes (51.4%). All participants had a fever higher than 380C, and commonly it was persistent for the first 5 days (Figure 1). Similarly, in both sexes sore throat and cough mostly ended in the first 7 days. Symptoms of prolonged cough and sore throat were more common in men (Figure 2). The complaint of fatigue ended within 20 days after treatment, and no significant gender discrimination was observed. The complaint of prolonged fatigue that continued for more than 30 days was remarkably with a rate of 16.8%. Shortness of breath showed improvement in the 20-day period after treatment with a very high rate and rarely continued for a period exceeding 1 month (2.7%).
The vast majority of the participants complained of loss of taste and smell, and the ratio of people who did not experience these two symptoms was less than 10%. Again, these two symptoms mostly disappeared within the first 20 days after treatment and could last longer than 30 days with a rate of 2.2%. In the 68% of patients, headache improved in the first 10 days. Back or chest pain also improved in the first 10 days with a rate of 64.3%, and widespread muscle-joint pain extended up to 20 days. There was no nasal discharge in 96.8% of the patients, and it remained as a subtle symptom in those who did. In addition; the diarrhea, which was mostly observed at the initial stage of COVID-19 disease, was also observed at a rate of 7% after treatment. With a detailed anamnesis, it was learned that these people did not take medication for diarrhea complaints and recovered in a short time. Interestingly, hair loss, a symptom that was not common in the literature before, was also observed with a frequency of 42.7%, but 34.1% of these people were women (n:63) (Tables 1).