| Kye Hwa Lee | 2 Articles |
Chronic widespread pain (CWP) is known as a common symptom of several organic and psychological disorders. Although medically unexplained CWP (MUE) has lots of clinical distress symptoms, there were no distinct symptoms or signs. Therefore, we conducted this study to investigate clinical distress symptoms of MUE distinct from those of medically explained CWP (ME). One hundred nine patients with CWP were enrolled in the study. We classified the study subjects into three groups depending on their medical problems associated with CWP: organic group (ORG), psychological group (PSY), and MUE. All subjects were asked to fill out self-report questionnaires consisting of clinical distress scales including the Korean version of the Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire (FIQ-K), fatigue scale, depression scale, and stress scale. And physicians examined 18 tender points over their entire body of the subjects. MUE patients had higher FIQ-K and fatigue severity scores than ORG patients (all P < 0.05). The average number of tender points were 11.33 in MUE patients, 6.48 in ORG patients and 5.02 in PSY patients and statistically significant (P < 0.0001). There were no statistically different factors between MUE and PSY patients with exception for the number of tender points. Depressive symptom was the highest in PSY patients but not statistically different from MUE patients. MUE patients had higher physical impairments, fatigue severity and more number of tender points than ORG patients, but had no different clinical characteristics from PSY patients except for the number of tender points. Citations Citations to this article as recorded by
Background
It is well-known that patients with chronic fatigue or frequent pain seek complementary and alternative medicine therapies (CAT) in Western countries. We conducted this study to determine the pattern of CAT use and the factors related to CAT use in patients with chronic fatigue or pain in Korea.Methods: This was a cross-sectional study. The participants (n = 143) with chronic fatigue or pain completed a self-reported questionnaire including demographic characteristics and lifestyle as well as disease-related and CAT-related items.Results: The frequency of CAT use was 51.0% and 39.2% over the past 10 years and 1 year, respectively. The most common type of CAT used was herbal medicine. The therapeutic effects of the CAT were similar to physicians' prescriptions. CAT were most often used in combination with conventional medicine rather than alone. More than 70.0% of subjects did not consult their physicians for the use of CAT. The duration of illness, severity of fatigue and pain was signifi cantly related to the use of CAT. Conclusion: Many patients with chronic fatigue or pain use CAT. Most of these patients do not consult their physicians regarding CAT use. Citations Citations to this article as recorded by
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