An interview with Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez on adapting care during the pandemic and her commitment to long covid research.
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By: Avery Nennmann
Date posted: July 29, 2025.
On May 29, 2025, RIM researchers Liya Lin and Avery Nennmann sat down for a virtual interview with Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, a physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist out of San Antonio, Texas. The first person in her family to attend medical school, Dr. Gutierrez was driven by a passion for medicine, but it was her grandfather’s stroke that eventually led her to specialize in rehabilitation medicine. She was drawn to treating patients with disabilities who need help with recovery and want to get better, and have medical management teams that work alongside patients for best outcomes. Reflecting on her grandfather’s stroke, she realizes he would have been a perfectly good rehab candidate. But without high medical literacy or advocacy efforts, he spent the rest of his life in a nursing home. “Even though he had both VA benefits and Medicare benefits, he still didn’t get access to [the] best quality rehabilitation.” That lack of access when he most needed it was “what drives me now and what I do,” she explained.
When the pandemic struck in early 2020, Dr. Gutierrez had just taken a position as the lead of the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at UT Health San Antonio. As an outpatient clinical practice, the department’s deployment of medical personnel differed from the high-intensity scenarios seen in emergency rooms and overcrowded hospitals. However, the patient volume was so overwhelming that triage protocols had to be implemented, and units were reorganized to manage the demand.
“We still had physicians […] who were in the hospital, who were taking care of patients … We had a rehab unit in the hospital. They had to, at one point, close our rehab unit so that they could use rooms for [COVID] patients. . . . There are so many patients hospitalized; it was like, okay, rehab is not a priority right now. We just need to get patients and fit them in our hospital.”
During those initial few months, her unit monitored patients in the hospital and was part of the palliative medicine team, often working alongside cancer specialists and other doctors outside of rehabilitation medicine. Rehabilitation medicine has long been shaped by the demands of wartime injuries and the aftermath of past pandemics. Drawing on that history, Dr. Gutierrez quickly recognized the moment she was facing. As the world became increasingly inaccessible and dangerous—especially for the disabled community she cared for—she knew a shift was needed. Embracing new technologies and rethinking how care could be delivered, she began to reimagine her practice with accessibility at its core. The answer: telemedicine—the ability to get on a video call with your doctor without the need for coming into the office. This practice helped patients feel safe, limited commuting time and costs, and allowed Dr. Gutierrez to assess patients in their homes—allowing for more personability and connection.
As COVID swept the nation, people with disabilities and disenfranchised groups began to lose access to services and social safety nets necessary for their health care. Dr. Gutierrez worked alongside this population as they navigated the fear that came with caretakers entering homes and possibly getting those with immunocompromised systems sick. These issues posed new questions for Dr. Gutierrez during the pandemic: What medical interventions are considered urgent? What can be done at home? What are the risks that come with maintaining rehabilitation efforts with patients? In our interview, she reflected on the compounding challenges that these risks posed—and the toll exacted on her patients:
“I mean, some of the saddest stuff that happened during COVID, if that I can think about like having a patient who, you know, had significant needs, was paralyzed, couldn’t communicate, and their caregiver died of COVID. And then here’s this person that now has to go into a nursing home, or has to go into institutional care, and they don’t have that same loving caregiver because their caregiver died of COVID, you know, or seeing my patients get COVID themselves, and then having to be in the hospital getting more complications.”
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A major turning point for Dr. Gutierrez was when patients began coming in for long-term symptoms from COVID infections that mimicked brain damage biomarkers she had previously seen in patients with Traumatic Brain Injuries. Due to this shift in patient demographics, Dr. Gutierrez now largely works with COVID because of a new population of people with impairments who need rehabilitation.
In the wake of misinformation and dismissal of long COVID symptoms and diagnostic criteria, Dr. Gutierrez maintains her steadfast belief in validating patients’ symptoms and pain. She reflected on the need for validation in the medical field: “Patients like to hear [that] you’re not alone. Other people are dealing with this. This could be long COVID. We don’t have all the answers yet. Let’s try to control what we can. Let’s try to reverse what we can. Let’s try to treat what we can.”
With COVID care becoming central to rehabilitation efforts in the past five years, Dr. Gutierrez has volunteered with the National Academies and has become an advocate for telemedicine, accessibility to care, and advising clinicians about best practices for patients with long COVID in her community. This dedication gave rise to her proudest professional moments: speaking at the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, chaired by Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), in Washington, DC. (Members of Rituals in the Making followed closely hearings held by the Republican-controlled subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic the following year; see, for example, our dispatch on “expertise under debate.”) During the subcommittee hearings, she remembers specifically talking about long COVID, the broader impacts of the new disease, the need for better and more accessible tests, and her ability to “be there as a researcher, as a clinician, and to advocate for the millions of people who are suffering with long COVID.”