- th / 0 20 20 38 v 1 1 2 Fe b 20 02 Chiral restoration from pionic atoms ?

We evaluate widths and shifts of pionic atoms using a theoretical microscopical potential in which the pion decay constant fπ is changed by the medium fπ(ρ) one, predicted by many different approaches. We show that the results obtained for shifts and widths are worse than if the correction is not implemented. Only in the case where one implements the modification in the real part of the s−wave potential, and omits it in the rest, can one find an appreciable improvement, an option which is, however, unjustified theoretically. On the other hand, we argue that in microscopic many body approaches for the pion selfenergy, starting from effective Lagrangians, the mechanisms responsible for the change of fπ in the medium should be automatically incorporated and its explicit addition in the calculation would lead to doublecounting.