Anorexia And Causation

ANOREXIA

Acepted symptoms, published by J.P.Feighner and associates in 1972

1. Onset prior to the age of twenty-five

2. Lack of appetite accompanied by loss of at least 25 percent of original body weight.

3. A distorted, implacable attitude to eating, food, or weight that overides hunger, admonitions, reassurance, and threats; for example, (a) denial of illness with a failure to recognise nutritional needs, (b) apparent enjoyment in losing weight with overt manifestation that refusing food is a pleasurable indulgence, (c) a desired body image of extreme thiness with overt evidence that is rewarding to the patient to achieve and maintain this state, and (d) unusual handling or hoarding of food.

4. No known medical illness that could account for the anorexia and weight loss.

5. No other known psychiatric disorder, particularly primary affective disorders, schizophrenia, obsessive-complusive disorder, and phobic neurosis. (The assumpltion is made that even though it may appear phobic or obsessional, food refusal alone is not sufficient to qualify for obsessive-compulsive or phobic disease.

- Pretty useless symptoms. They are not necessarily

symptoms but more overly observations of the people they would like to classify as anorexic.

"The symptoms he listed are derived from empirical observation and statistcal frequency rather than from a rational ordering of causal mechanisms. The criteria for age and for weight loss merely reflect what has been observed most of the time; they are not arbitrary, but neither are they part of a logical chain of reasoning. The third symptom obviously is difficult to define in practice since it so heavily involves the observer's subjectivity, while the fourth and fifth conditions

merely state what the disease is not."

They do not allow for the older anorexic either of which there are, even though less in number.

Is it therefore possible to exactly clarify what anorexia is?

Having stemmed from Greek, 'anorexia' litreally means lack of appetite. Such a symptom of illness is however, common to many afflictions that differ in type of sickness. People with terminal illness are often subject to it as well as schizopfrenics and in cases of depression. It is therefore of great difficulty to distinguish between other such illnesses and a singular disease as anorexia. In Freigners and his associate's symptoms it is simply stated, "no known medical illness that could account for the anorexia and weight loss," which is hardly a helpful description. It is more overly an open ended definition of something they cannot quite place their fingers on.

Although there has been much research

into the causes of anorexia and other eating disorders such as bulimia, all that can really be clarified from such work are certain predominant characteristics. There are many theories of its causation but none are defininative