Symptoms and Treatment

There’s a lot of dispute about how to treat eating disorders. Some doctors find that slow recovery is best. For example, a patient stays at the hospital for weeks and slowly builds up the amount of food intake they have. Others find it best for the patient to eat lots of high calorie food in a short amount of time to help the patient gain weight quickly. The only downfall to this approach is that it can cause serious mental damage. In some extreme cases, when a patient is severely thin and they eat too many calories too quickly, their bodies start to shut down and they can die. Yet again, if the recovery is too slow, it can also cause their body to shut down. These reasons make it really hard to find the best recovery option and it differs between every patient (Wang).

As of July 17, 2020, there are no FDA approved medications for anorexia. Anti-depressants can be prescribed by a doctor, but that doesn’t specifically help with weight gain. There are small amounts of evidence to prove that second-generation antipsychotic medications can help with weight gain, but it isn’t used on patients due to doctors not fully understanding why it leads to weight gain. Antipsychotic medications are used purely to help the mental stability of patients which leads to them wanting to gain weight, it doesn't actually affect how their body absorbs food. Birth control pills are also sometimes prescribed to females with anorexia in an attempt to restart their menstrual cycle. Yet, there is no known evidence that it is affective. Birth control pills also can mask the symptoms of anorexia by causing artificial periods (Muhlheim).