Patient education to encourage graded exercise in chronic fatigue syndrome

doi:10.1136/bmj.322.7301.1545

BMJ 2001;322:1545 ( 23 June )

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Patient education to encourage graded exercise in chronic fatigue syndrome

Trial has too many shortcomings

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Trial has too many shortcomings

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ Powell et al's controlled trial of graded physical exercise in chronic fatigue syndrome has several shortcomings.¹

Firstly, the only tool that was used to assess the level of physical activity was entirely subjective. This was a single item(the third item) of the 11 item standardised SF-36 health surveyquestionnaire. Use of this single item alone as a valid measureof physical fitness is hardly acceptable in the absence of objectivedata.

Secondly, in a randomised study one can only compare like with like. In this case, all patients in the intervention arms hada minimum of three telephone contacts during the first three months.Patients in the control group were abandoned to primary care afterthe randomisation. Why did the investigators not maintain thesame number of telephone contacts with the control group? Theycould have discussed anything but chronicfatigue.

Thirdly, frequent early contacts with patients in . . . [Full text of this article]

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