This is not the worst article on the issue by a long way. However, perhaps that is not necessarily a good thing: a patient might be less wary of somebody who knows something about the condition.
TABLE 2: Typical Treatments Used to Treat Patients With CFS
[..]
Treatment: Activity management
Potential Implications to Exercise Professional:
Implementation of a regular exercise program may appear to be contradictory to advice provided by other health professions to moderate physical activity to prevent exacerbation of symptoms. Patients with CFS should be educated that gradual increases in physical activity will have a positive impact on their symptoms.
My underlining: this is too definite. Gradual increases won't necessarily have this impact with everyone
(less important point)
Treatment: Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
Potential Implications to Exercise Professional:
CBT is delivered by a mental health provider to identify negative beliefs and behaviors in an effort to replace them with positive healthy behaviors. Efforts should be made to communicate with the mental health provider to ensure that the exercise environment is supportive of these strategies.
What is defined as "negative beliefs and behaviors" and "positive healthy behaviors" could be incorrect.
This reduction in exercise capacity may be a result of CFS itself or caused by the deconditioning that accompanies a reduction in activity level that accompanies CFS. Although there are occasional reports to the contrary, the consensus of findings from studies of clients with CFS is that cardiac, pulmonary, muscular, metabolic, immune, and endocrine responses to acute exercise are similar to those seen in normal individuals with profound deconditioning (1,3,10,17).
I don't believe there is this consensus. (And of course, even if there is a consensus, we don't have to accept it's true).
Despite the potential for an initial aggravation of symptoms at the onset of an exercise program, an overall improvement in symptoms has been reported in clients with CFS who participate in an exercise training program.
Usually only fatigue symptoms have been reported in trials of exercise training programs.
Also, an average improvement doesn't mean everyone benefited.
An important aspect of this approach is to educate the client that implementation of prolonged or complete rest periods during the day to offset small increases in symptoms is counterproductive and may lead to increased loss of functional abilities.
The "or" means people shouldn't have "complete rest periods", which is debatable.
Not sure if prolonged rest periods are necessarily a problem either, if people do a reasonable amount of activity in total across the day.
There are aspects to what he says which as I say are better than somebody who doesn't know anything about the condition which would probably mean their programs per session/week might cause fewer problems. But I think the overall message is problematic.
