Quote (Skinned @ 12 Aug 2016 15:16)
Anorexia is a terrible disease that kills many people every year and if anybody here works in health care and is sitting at a desk and a continuance of care package comes by for somebody with anorexia they better take notice, because that is a client that could very easily die on them, and having clients die on you is a very bad thing in our field.
Anorexia is a disease by every definition of the word, which simply is a physical condition one is in that causes dis-ease. On the ground we don't really believe in mind-body dualism in health care, we use the entire person as the focus. This wasn't the case for a very long time, but now it is. Medical doctors are finally catching up to the ecological perspective and social determinants of health and even health insurance companies are finally catching up on mental-physical health parity in reimbursement.
There are many diseases, some of them are purely physical phenomena that you can physically see with scans and manipulate. Some of them are less understood but are identifiable by being a collection of symptoms and evidence based-practices to ease the dis-ease from individuals experiencing them. The first type are in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases (ICD which is in the 9th edition) and the second type are in the Diagnostic and Statistical manual of Mental Disorders (DSM which is in its 5th edition). We are constantly learning new things about both types every day in all directions of research and hopefully new sciences like cognitive science will eventually bridge the gap of practices completely so a whole mind & body theory of medicine can be pioneered because what we are doing now isn't it....humanity is a bridge.
Having bad habits isn't delusion, it is probably a result of socialization and having parents who don't know how to cook.
There are mental illnesses that center around the mind's projection of its body etc, but that isn't common at all. Anecdotal evidence and "common sense" points that way, but a lot of things are counter intuitive.
I wouldn't call anorexia a disease, but rather a (mental) disorder.
Might be nitpicky, but still...
Also, from wiki:
Quote
Globally anorexia is estimated to affect two million people as of 2013.[9] It is estimated to occur in 0.9% to 4.3% of women and 0.2% to 0.3% of men in Western countries at some point in their life.[10] About 0.4% of young females are affected in a given year and it is estimated to occur ten times less commonly in males.[4][10] Rates in most of the developing world are unclear. In 2013 it directly resulted in about 600 deaths globally up from 400 deaths in 1990.
It's not that common to die from it.
This post was edited by hATemOnkEy on Aug 14 2016 04:35pm