Anorexia Mentalis And Its Treatment Options Part 1

Anorexia is fine example of psycho –somatic diseases. Diseases are mainly of two kinds: physical and mental. Some diseases alternate between physical and mental levels. In this age of struggle, tension, stress, competition, jealousy, ambitiousness the diseases are mostly mental in origin.
Apparently, Anorexia seems to be physical simple disease condition, but it is purely mental condition and mental disorder and is very serious. The patient must recognize his symptoms himself in its early stage .Eating disorders are very rare in occurrence. But anorexia is found in girls mostly at the threshold of puberty.
The anorexia mentalis originate in a

very peculiar way in young girls. The young girls are very conscious of their body structure and figure and beauty. Fearing, that they may put on extra molecules of fat in their body waist they start eating less and less; much lesser than the physical need and requirement of their bodies. The body cells start shrinking gradually and they become thinner and thinner. It becomes their wishful thinking not to eat and they loose all hunger and develop rather aversion to food with nauseating sensation. Anorexia may be defined as the patient’s psychic denial and refusal to maintain a healthy body weight coupled with strong sense of gaining extra body weight leading eventually to distorted body image or disfiguring, unharmonious body figure.
The one more reason of anorexia mentalis especially in young boys and girls is shock and grief and mental trauma out of love failure. This happens with mostly hysterical and nervous type of constitutions. From denial of love and disapproval of love by their beloved ones, their psyche is so injured and traumatized that they can not cope with the grief situation. They start suffering in silence and do not tell the real story of their disappointed love affair to anyone. They keep it very near to their minds. These young boys and girls are very secretive, bashful, shy, timid, and reserved in nature. These may be termed as “introverted and closed” in Alder’s terminology, the great psychologist of the nineteenth century. They shut them selves in their den or shell of grief. Even they don’t weep in the public view let anyone know their real condition of mind, rather they weep sobbingly in the solitude. One great identification and recognition of such silent grief sufferer teenagers is that, they take lot of deep sighs of breath as if they are starving of oxygen. Their mind constantly dwells on past occurrences, sufferings and events. They start churning their grief and suffering silently .They start enjoying the grief and suffering in a way silently. This mental condition of deep shock and trauma takes its toll and tells bad effect on the body. Consequently they loose all their hunger and start loosing weight. They start suffering from what may be exactly called anorexia mentalis. The symptoms of anorexia are very vague and absurd. Loss of hunger is the striking symptom. Inordinate craving for sodium chloride or common salt is the second striking keynote of this mental disorder. When they try to eat; the food comes out of mouth and there is gagging. Even it is difficult to eat single morsel of food. Irregular menstrual cycle may accompany with the anorexia mentalis. They may suffer from inveterate kind of constipation also. The hair on the head may start falling in bunches or while combing I have observed that such mental condition may result also from the sudden death of mother or father in the family.
The attending psychiatrist must attain and prepare assessment of the psychical and mental condition of the victim. The BMI must be monitored. BMI is body mass index which is calculated using body mass and height. The greatest difficulty while treating such cases comes when the victim is extremely in “denial mood” and he or she continues to maintain the fixed idea about his gaining weight. He is obsessed with weight and monomania of gaining the slightest extra weight. The patient may deny even, that there nothing is wrong with him or her and why should he take the treatment when he is not ill at all.. There is nothing wrong with him/her. The idea of gaining weight is very frightening with such patients. The low energy level may lead the patient into depression with lot of weeping and sighing and sobbing.
Treatment
What are treatment options available to the patient? We should remember that anorexia is not simple loss of hunger as is seen sometimes with disfunctioning of liver. It is not at all functional disease of stomach or liver. Its roots are in the psyche of the patient. Instead of providing nutritional diet we should make the mind of the patient healthier by counseling and hypnotism. we should never console the patient as it always aggravates the condition of the patient. The homoeopathy is only the legitimate option which can cure this mental, disorder never to reoccur the whole life. Homoeopathy is holistic in approach and it concentrates on the psyche of patient and accordingly a selection may be made of medicine. The miraculous power of Homoeopathy of curing sickness in humans may be demonstrated to its staunch opponents by curing such cases permanently and in a short span of time. In a different article (part2) I will elaborate the homoeopathic treatment for this mental condition in a detailed manner with notes on prominent medicines used in the cure of this condition.