ME/CFS Australia (SA) Inc: CFS physician course scores amazing results

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CFS physician course scores amazing results

Saturday 10 January 2009

Cort Johnsonhas a great story on a new medical education course that proactive doctors in the US are participating in:

Quite quietly and under most patients’ radar the CFIDS Association of America has been rewriting the rules on how to educate physicians about this disease. Not happy with the CDC’s old course they released a new physician education course on Medscape about three months and the results just came in; the course has been suprisingly successful.

Thus far over 13,000 health professionals have taken it. Since a study shows that each of them treats about 3 CFS patient a week this means the course is positively impacting about 36,000 patients a week (!).

One of the goals of the course was to teach doctors how to differentiate CFS from depression. This means fewer people with CFS are being shunted by ignorant doctors into the depressed category. (Hasn’t virtually everyone experienced that one!) Hopefully they’re also catching these patients before they’re exhausting all their reserves – as so many of us did – and bottoming out in a horrendous crash.

This is the first widely disseminated educational course actually created by CFS physicians (Dr. Lapp and Dr. Bateman) for CFS patients. Not surprisingly, it’s very different from the CDC course and its already more popular; almost ten times as many physicians have taken the CAA’s new course in the first four months of its existence than took the CDC’s course in its first four years. The people at Medscape are reportedly very happy and sound rather surprised at the success of the course thus far.

The success of the course thus far suggests that physicians are eager to learn about CFS if it is presented to them properly. The course also, of course, presents an opportunity for people who already know they have this disorder to get their physicians some good information. More people that know they have this disease means more clout for us as well.

This is all good news for the ME/CFS Community. For more on this: