Because patients with chronic disease must be their own principal caretakers, education of patients for this task is essential for good health care. In evaluating education programs, there can be differences in selection of programs and in methods used for meta-analysis. However, as in this case, no contribution is made to improving health care by grouping and evaluating together widely different education programs that are delivered in widely different ways by people with widely different skills. What is needed is to identify successful programs and their components and to analyze the ways those components act and interact. In the process, rigorous longitudinal studies will be essential.