Weston, Sarah, Townsend, Stella · Nursing times · 2009
A specialist rehabilitation team in Shropshire created a DVD and booklet to teach people with ME/CFS about pacing—a technique that involves carefully balancing rest and activity to manage fatigue. This resource was designed to help patients better understand and practice pacing in their daily lives. The team found that these educational materials helped them support their patients more effectively.
ME/CFS patients struggle with activity management, and pacing is a widely recommended self-management strategy. Educational tools that clearly explain and normalize pacing techniques may improve patient engagement with rehabilitation services and help people with ME/CFS better manage their condition in daily life.
This study does not prove that pacing using this DVD/booklet improves patient outcomes, as it contains no control group, before-and-after measurements, or patient outcome data. It also does not establish that the multimedia format is more effective than other educational methods, nor does it demonstrate long-term patient compliance or efficacy.
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
Weston, Sarah & Townsend, Stella (2009). Using a DVD to help people with chronic fatigue syndrome learn the technique of pacing.. Nursing times. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20034300/
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-weston-2009-using-dvd,
author = {Weston, Sarah and Townsend, Stella},
title = {Using a DVD to help people with chronic fatigue syndrome learn the technique of pacing.},
journal = {Nursing times},
year = {2009},
note = {PubMed: 20034300},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/weston-2009-using-dvd},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-30. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/weston-2009-using-dvd
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