Living With Food: The Science Supporting Eating Disorder Treatment

It’s difficult to do effective eating disorder treatment. There are multiple reasons for this including:

1. Issues surrounding training
2. Cost
3. Insurance, and
4. The newness of evidence-based treatment for eating disorders

Training for doing eating disorder treatment: 

Typically, specialized training is not part of the usual curriculum for virtually any mental health provider. In order to do evidence-based treatment, usually one must get training outside of standard professional education. Where to get training and how to find experts to train with may be complicated. If you are a mental health provider and you did your training more than 10 years ago, you probably wouldn’t be exposed to these ideas or techniques even if you aggressively sought them out.

Cost of eating disorder treatment:

Financial issues also exist. It is more expensive to treat eating disorders than many other psychiatric disorders since they involve complicated multi-specialty teams. These teams likely include dietitians, primary care physicians, specialist physicians, and the need for multiple weekly visits, lab work, and other medical treatments and evaluations. Practitioners must be prepared to develop a team and work in teams to adequately address the various aspects of treatment.

Insurance and eating disorder treatment:

Insurance coverage may also be a limitation to obtaining effective treatment. Most insurance plans limit the amount of coverage they provide for patients with eating disorders. Although this is true for psychiatric disorders in general, coverage for eating disorder treatment is even more limited than other diagnoses. This is the case in many states, including Ohio. True effective eating disorder treatment is neither fast nor easy. It takes a complicated multi-disciplinary treatment team working together over a prolonged period of time to reverse a behavioral disorder that may have been present for years. In general, insurance is looking to shorten the course of treatment to make it less expensive. To be effective, eating disorder therapists must resist the pressures placed on them by insurance companies.

Newness of eating disorder treatment:

Another significant issue is that many effective eating disorder treatments are quite new. Treatment now is vastly different than it was 10 years ago. In order to provide effective care, therapists must stay current and be able to do ongoing training. For a therapist, eating disorder treatment is challenging. Patients have life threatening illnesses, the eating disorder itself is resistant to change, medical complications are common, the social support for having eating disorders often isn’t strong, and frustration for a therapist is quite common. Without a supportive team and effective care, a therapist may burn out.

Next week: What is the length of eating disorder treatment?

Contributions by Sarah Emerman