“If you have a child with cancer, you wouldn’t wait until they had reached stage four cancer before starting treatment. It’s no different with an eating disorder, because if you delay treatment, then the illness becomes more ingrained and more difficult to treat.”
Ulrike Schmidt, professor of eating disorders at King’s College London (KCL), is explaining why she and a team of medical personnel have begun helping young adults suffering from anorexia and bulimia to start specialist treatment within weeks rather than the months of delay that are so common across the NHS. The first episode and rapid early intervention for eating disorders (Freed) trial has only been going for nine months but has so far given patients – mainly young women – access to vital treatment in an average of 33 days rather than the usual time of between four and eight months.
[For more of this story, written by Denis Campbell, go to http://www.theguardian.com/soc...ial-anorexia-bulemia]
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