Eating Disorders Treatment: Key Points and Treatment Goals.
Key Points
Evidence-based treatment delivered by health professionals with expertise in the care of patients with ED is mandatory.
Optimal care includes a multidisciplinary team approach by ED specialists including medical, psychological, nutritional, and psychopharmacologic services.
Families & spouses should be included whenever possible.
Treatment Goals
Nutritional rehabilitation, weight restoration & stabilization, complete physiologic restoration, management of refeeding complications, and interruption of purging/compensatory behaviors should be the immediate goals of treatment for all patients with EDs.
Achievement of an individual’s appropriate healthy weight will improve the physical, psychological, social, and emotional functioning of that patient.
Failure to fully restore weight correlates with worse outcomes, and maintenance of the weight restored strongly correlates with a good outcome.
If psychological and other therapeutic goals are sometimes addressed from the beginning of treatment, in parallel with early nutritional and physiologic goals. If this was not possible, they should be addressed shortly after early nutritional and therapeutic goals are reached.
A person with an ED is NOT recovered once physical health and weight are restored. Distorted body image and/or ED thoughts may persist despite weight restoration and will likely require longer-term therapy.