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).