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

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.

Why the Psychosomatic View on Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Is Inconsistent with Current Evidence and Harmful to Patients

“…Together with the known lack of knowledge about ME/CFS by physicians [45,60], this makes it necessary for political and medical institutions to broadly inform physicians and the public about the disease in order to counter misinformation and prevent patients from being stigmatized, misdiagnosed, and mistreated based on incorrect psychosomatic theories. Expert-led webinars have been shown to be a feasible approach to educating physicians about the nature of ME/CFS, resulting in physicians making fewer incorrect psychosomatic attributions of ME/CFS in a knowledge test after attending the webinar [98].…”