I attended this free seminar yesterday on Aneroxia just for the sake of it. Professor Stephen Touyz (extremely well-known and a real expert on the topic of eating disorders) gave the talk. Again, I was completely blown away by the humility of these great scientists... how they bother to find the time in their busy schedule to give a talk in a dingy old lecture theatre to about 100 or so people. His talk was mostly on the therapy of this misfortune over the years, and he gave a thorough critique on the Karolinska Insitute (in Sweden) and their claim for having a 75% recovery rate. I will just jot down a couple of interesting stories/facts.
Can I just say that this is not beautiful. Its just sad and wrong. No one is going to love you more just because you have bones jutting out of you.
- apparently, people who starve themselves but are not within a certain body mass index (BMI) are not clinically aneroxics (even though they're clearly starving themselves!) Instead, they're put within the category of unidentified eating disorders or something... weird.
- a study was run and found out that aneroxics knew that they looked thin. In fact, they had spot on accuracy of just how they looked. The problem was, they still felt fat.
- a group of men who were supposed to be recruited for the army in the 80's were given the choice to take part of a study instead where they were starved for 4 months or so. They exhibited the same symptoms as many anorexics... depression, hypothermia, a restlessness etc. The results of this study is often used by the Karolinska Institute to prove that aneroxia is not a psychological illness. Instead, it is a medical problem.
- Hypothermia is one of the symptoms of anorexia and there was this one girl who felt so desperately cold that when she was in the shower, she kept making the water hotter and hotter until finally she burnt herself because she just couldnt get warm enough.
- There were these prisoners in a war that had to build a bridge or something? And they had sooo little to eat and were constantly starving such that they even looked like anorexics but some survived. When they were finally rescued, the one thing that they really wanted was food. But when they ate the food, they started dying! And nobody could understand why they could survive through the war in such terrible conditions only to die when they were rescued. It turns out that when you starve yourself, your electrolyte levels drop and one of the most important one is phosphate. Phosphate is needed in a number of physiological functions, including digestion. So these guys had such low phosphate levels that when they started eating all this food, all the phosphate got sucked up for digesting so they died!! o_O
Anyways I could go on but the log would get too long. I wasn't too interested in the treatment bit but the bottom line of his arguement was that the Karolinska' Institute's claim was not backed by good and firm scientific evidence. He also mentioned a huge study run by this other dude in South Australia who said that anorexia cannot be treated. Professor Touyz took the middle ground.
Can I just say that this is not beautiful. Its just sad and wrong. No one is going to love you more just because you have bones jutting out of you.
- apparently, people who starve themselves but are not within a certain body mass index (BMI) are not clinically aneroxics (even though they're clearly starving themselves!) Instead, they're put within the category of unidentified eating disorders or something... weird.
- a study was run and found out that aneroxics knew that they looked thin. In fact, they had spot on accuracy of just how they looked. The problem was, they still felt fat.
- a group of men who were supposed to be recruited for the army in the 80's were given the choice to take part of a study instead where they were starved for 4 months or so. They exhibited the same symptoms as many anorexics... depression, hypothermia, a restlessness etc. The results of this study is often used by the Karolinska Institute to prove that aneroxia is not a psychological illness. Instead, it is a medical problem.
- Hypothermia is one of the symptoms of anorexia and there was this one girl who felt so desperately cold that when she was in the shower, she kept making the water hotter and hotter until finally she burnt herself because she just couldnt get warm enough.
- There were these prisoners in a war that had to build a bridge or something? And they had sooo little to eat and were constantly starving such that they even looked like anorexics but some survived. When they were finally rescued, the one thing that they really wanted was food. But when they ate the food, they started dying! And nobody could understand why they could survive through the war in such terrible conditions only to die when they were rescued. It turns out that when you starve yourself, your electrolyte levels drop and one of the most important one is phosphate. Phosphate is needed in a number of physiological functions, including digestion. So these guys had such low phosphate levels that when they started eating all this food, all the phosphate got sucked up for digesting so they died!! o_O
Anyways I could go on but the log would get too long. I wasn't too interested in the treatment bit but the bottom line of his arguement was that the Karolinska' Institute's claim was not backed by good and firm scientific evidence. He also mentioned a huge study run by this other dude in South Australia who said that anorexia cannot be treated. Professor Touyz took the middle ground.
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