Abstract
BackgroundThroughout the world, patients with chronic diseases/illnesses use complementary and alternative medicines (CAM). The use of CAM is also substantial among patients with diseases/illnesses of unknown aetiology. Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also termed myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), is no exception. Hence, a systematic review of randomised controlled trials of CAM treatments in patients with CFS/ME was undertaken to summarise the existing evidence from RCTs of CAM treatments in this patient population.MethodsSeventeen data sources were searched up to 13th August 2011. All randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of any type of CAM therapy used for treating CFS were included, with the exception of acupuncture and complex herbal medicines; studies were included regardless of blinding. Controlled clinical trials, uncontrolled observational studies, and case studies were excluded.ResultsA total of 26 RCTs, which included 3,273 participants, met our inclusion criteria. The CAM therapy from the RCTs included the following: mind-body medicine, distant healing, massage, tuina and tai chi, homeopathy, ginseng, and dietary supplementation. Studies of qigong, massage and tuina were demonstrated to have positive effects, whereas distant healing failed to do so. Compared with placebo, homeopathy also had insufficient evidence of symptom improvement in CFS. Seventeen studies tested supplements for CFS. Most of the supplements failed to show beneficial effects for CFS, with the exception of NADH and magnesium.ConclusionsThe results of our systematic review provide limited evidence for the effectiveness of CAM therapy in relieving symptoms of CFS. However, we are not able to draw firm conclusions concerning CAM therapy for CFS due to the limited number of RCTs for each therapy, the small sample size of each study and the high risk of bias in these trials. Further rigorous RCTs that focus on promising CAM therapies are warranted.
Highlights
Throughout the world, patients with chronic diseases/illnesses use complementary and alternative medicines (CAM)
Several CAM treatments for Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) patients were described in a previous review, the review only included literature up to April 2007 [7]
The randomised controlled trials (RCTs) included in the table employed the following treatments: mind-body medicine (4) [10,11,12,13], massage (2) [14,15], tuina and tai chi (1) [16], homeopathy (2) [17,18], ginseng (1) [19], nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH) (2) [20,21], and dietary supplements (14) [22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35]
Summary
Throughout the world, patients with chronic diseases/illnesses use complementary and alternative medicines (CAM). Throughout the world, patients with chronic diseases tend to be high utilisers of health care resources and/or the health care system Such patients are frequent users of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) services, which are present either within or outside the National Health Service. As of yet, no single cause of CFS has been discovered, potential factors, which are still questionable, have been identified [1,2,3] Several treatments for this condition have been explored; none has shown persistent or consistently significant outcomes in this patient population [4,5,6].
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