  We consider two methods to find the effective parameters of the pion
traversing a nuclear medium. One is the first order chiral perturbation
theoretic evaluation of the pion pole contribution to the two-point function of
the axial-vector current. The other is the exact, first order virial expansion
of the pion self-energy. We find that, although the results of chiral
perturbation theory are not valid at normal nuclear density, those from the
virial expansion may be reliable at such density. The latter predicts both the
mass-shift and the in-medium decay width of the pion to be small, of about a
few MeV.
