Medicine: Food First

When people lose all desire to eat, for no apparent physical or emotional cause, doctors call it anorexia nervosa (nervous lack of appetite). For three generations they have argued about how best to treat it, with recent opinion favoring an analytic type of psychiatry. Now in the British Medical Journal, a brusque, no-nonsense Welshman indicates that it is time to boot the psychiatrists out and pump the patient full of food. His simple reasoning: the only treatable aspect of the baffling disorder is starvation, and the cure for starvation is food.

Dr. Eirian (rhymes with barbarian) Williams made a study of 53...