Abstract
Fatigue is highly prevalent in medical illness and injury and can have a significant negative effect on an individual’s ability to engage in, and benefit from, rehabilitation services. Fatigue can contribute to and exacerbate cognitive, physical, and mood concerns; interfere with successful completion of activities of daily living; and limit community reintegration. However, a patient’s fatigue experience is often overlooked for more visible signs of illness or injury, and clinicians may lack appropriate knowledge and tools for assessment or intervention. Therefore, this chapter will provide an overview of the construct and potential causes of fatigue to ensure understanding, briefly review select assessment methods, and explore both pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic intervention strategies. It will hopefully become evident that education, exercise, and health behavior interventions for fatigue should be first-line approaches, can be administered in a range of settings (and by varied professionals), require little specialized equipment, and yet are highly effective at helping patients to manage fatigue and thereby facilitate recovery and rehabilitation and promote optimal daily function.
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Jacocks, C. (2017). Fatigue. In: Budd, M., Hough, S., Wegener, S., Stiers, W. (eds) Practical Psychology in Medical Rehabilitation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-34034-0_33
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-34034-0_33
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