Qigong Exercise May Benefit Patients With Fibromyalgia

Inclusion criteria

• Patients with a diagnosis of primary FM, based on the 1990 American College of Rheumatology criteria (Wolfe et al, 1990),
• between the ages of 18 and 70 years;
• willing to withdraw from CNS-active therapies commonly used to treat FM; willing to discontinue treatment with transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, biofeedback, tender- and trigger-point injections, acupuncture, and anesthetic or narcotic patches;
• with a raw score > 4 on the physical function component of the Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire (FIQ) (Burckhardt et al, 1991);
• and a mean visual analog scale (VAS) pain score > 40 on a scale from 0 to 100.

Exclusion criteria

• severe psychiatric illness;
• a current major depressive episode (as determined by a Beck Depression Inventory (Beck et al, 1961) score >25);
• significant suicide risk;
• abuse of alcohol, benzodiazepines, or other drugs; a history of behavior that would prohibit compliance for the duration of the study;
• active cardiovascular, pulmonary, hepatic, renal, gastrointestinal, or autoimmune disease (except Hashimoto's or Graves' disease that had been stable for 3 months before screening);
• current systemic infection; active cancer (except basal cell carcinoma); unstable endocrine disease; severe sleep apnea;
• prostate enlargement or other genitourinary disorder (male patients);
• or pregnancy or breastfeeding (female patients).