What are energy impairment and ELCI?
Introducing the key features of energy-limiting chronic illness (ELCI) and energy impairment and why we use these terms.
Energy-limiting chronic illness (ELCI) is an umbrella term to describe long-term health conditions in which severe fatigue – or rather energy impairment – is a key disabling feature. ELCI and energy impairment are terms that have come out of our participatory research and they are important to our advocacy work as a Disabled People’s Organisation.
Through our multiple surveys and focus groups among the chronic illness community, we found that, while different diseases have their own unique clusters of symptoms that impact differently on each person, the predominant and most restricting feature of many chronic illnesses is fatigue or limited energy, as well as pain. The term we use for this is ‘energy impairment’.
There’s a reason we call it energy impairment, and not just fatigue.
