We all recognise the significant challenges of these conditions which can happen at any stage of life but particularly in adolescence. It is important to communicate early with medical personnel who can help to put the condition into context.
Here, we therefore refer early to specialists in eating disorders, involving a psychiatric assessment and psychological support.
Where these conditions have progressed to excessive body weight loss, hospital admission can be necessary.
We also look at underlying metabolic issues that may be affecting thought processes. These include deficiencies states and other features associated with optimising biological systems.
We have mentioned these systems many times before in other articles relating to health and wellness. But essentially they include the importance of optimal gut functioning, assessing the immune system, looking for underlying chronic infections, optimising detoxification of the body, assessing exposure to our toxic load with the exposome. You will remember that the exposome consists of toxicity that we are exposed to in our daily ecological environment. This will include infections, tick bites, EMF, more commonly known as electro-smog, exposure to damp and mould, chemicals which are all around us in abundance, metals and so on. Occasionally, some of the altered perceptions that are involved with eating disorders, not only relate to corrections that can be made to thought processes, but also optimising our biochemistry.
With eating disorders, because of the nature of the underlying disorder, which is often an obsession about control, we do not look into biological systems early on. Instead we usually prefer to do some simple basic medical and nutritional tests, followed by long-term support with psychological tools, from top experts in psychology or psychiatry, followed later by more in-depth analysis if necessary.
Remember, that with biological systems medicine, we are not only trying to turn around complex illness but we also want to keep the body well through our lives. So knowledge and attention given to biological systems management, is invaluable in this regard.