Froehlich, Laura, Niedrich, Jasmin, Hattesohl, Daniel B R et al. · Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023 · DOI
Many doctors and health professionals don't know enough about ME/CFS, which makes it harder for patients to get proper care. Researchers created an online webinar to teach German-speaking healthcare workers about ME/CFS and tested whether it helped them learn. The study found that the webinar successfully increased doctors' knowledge about the illness, suggesting that online education could be a practical way to train more healthcare providers.
ME/CFS patients frequently encounter medical underrecognition and inadequate care due to healthcare provider knowledge gaps. This study demonstrates that targeted webinar education is an efficient, scalable solution to address this barrier, potentially improving diagnostic accuracy and treatment quality for patients across multiple countries and healthcare systems.
This study does not establish whether increased knowledge translates into improved clinical outcomes or behavior change in actual patient care. It also does not demonstrate whether knowledge gains persist over time beyond the immediate post-webinar period, nor does it evaluate whether webinar-trained providers actually diagnose or manage ME/CFS more effectively than untrained providers in real-world settings.
About the PEM badge: “PEM required” means post-exertional malaise was an explicit required diagnostic criterion for participant inclusion in this study — not that PEM was studied, observed, or discussed. Studies using criteria that do not require PEM (e.g. Fukuda, Oxford) are tagged “PEM not required”. How the atlas works →
The first block is for the primary paper and is the citation you should use in research work. The atlas-snapshot line only applies if you are specifically referring to this atlas’s reading of the paper on the date shown.
Primary citation
Froehlich, Laura, Niedrich, Jasmin, Hattesohl, Daniel B R, Behrends, Uta, Kedor, Claudia, Haas, Johannes-Peter, et al. (2023). Evaluation of a Webinar to Increase Health Professionals' Knowledge about Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS).. Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland). https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare11152186
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-froehlich-2023-evaluation-webinar,
author = {Froehlich, Laura and Niedrich, Jasmin and Hattesohl, Daniel B R and Behrends, Uta and Kedor, Claudia and Haas, Johannes-Peter and Stingl, Michael and Scheibenbogen, Carmen},
title = {Evaluation of a Webinar to Increase Health Professionals' Knowledge about Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS).},
journal = {Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland)},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.3390/healthcare11152186},
note = {PubMed: 37570426},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/froehlich-2023-evaluation-webinar},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-29. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/froehlich-2023-evaluation-webinar
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