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).