Evaluation of a Webinar to Increase Health Professionals’ Knowledge about Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS),2023

Scheibenbogen et al

Abstract:
Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a severe chronic illness and patients with ME/CFS are often medically underserved in Germany and other countries. One contributing factor is health professionals’ lack of knowledge about epidemiology, diagnostic criteria, and treatment of ME/CFS. Opportunities are scarce for health professionals to receive continuing medical education on ME/CFS. The current research addressed this need for further education and investigated the gain of knowledge from a webinar for German-speaking health professionals. In two studies (total sample: N = 378), participants in the intervention condition completed a knowledge test twice (before and after webinar participation).

Study 2 also included a waiting-list control condition with repeated response to the knowledge test without webinar participation between measurements.

Results showed that at baseline, most participants had seen patients with ME/CFS, but confidence in diagnosing and treating ME/CFS was only moderate-to-low. In the intervention condition, but not in the control condition, knowledge about ME/CFS increased between the first and the second knowledge test.

These results indicate that the webinar was successful in increasing health professionals’ knowledge about ME/CFS. We concluded that webinars can be a cost-efficient and effective tool in providing health professionals with large-scale continuing medical education about ME/CFS.

https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9032/11/15/2186

 

There is repeated reference to treatment.

Surely there is no treatment for ME/CFS.

 

However frustrating it is to those of us who are beyond those improvements, there is still quite a lot that GPs can do to help. Even if it's just understanding what it is and giving the right advice. It can make a world of difference, I know it would have for me. Not for everyone, and the fear that is always present is that medicine stops there entirely, but there's no faulting the future benefits of medicine gaining a legitimate understanding.

At first things change very little, then a lot, then suddenly it's very different. We can keep a cooperative outlook on small improvements while being combative about the need to push further and research the hell out of this to give real effective solutions, and put an end to the destructive pseudoscience that made it impossible for decades.

I do agree that treatment isn't the right word, though. There must be a better one. I guess intervention is the closest, however annoying it is that it has a whole lot of BPS stink.

 

Sounds right. There must be a standard one for this, though. I assume it must be that. But the biopsychosocial stuff has thoroughly poisoned those perspectives. Although it's not as if those ideas are any recent, we can read them exactly as is from 150 years ago, the only difference is the weird writing style and different cultural descriptions.

And, somehow, poisons? As we've seen recently in another thread. Even by the standards of Star Trek's prime directive, medicine is the weirdest bunch in having some idea on the wall that barely anyone bothered following, literally for millennia.