Thinking Critically to Move Forward: Reflections on the International Conference on Eating Disorders 2016

For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed that I was at the International Conference on Eating Disorders (ICED), the major yearly conference put on by the Academy for Eating Disorders, over the past few days. As I write this post, I am sitting in the San Francisco Airport trying to synthesize my experiences into what may or may not turn into an epic blog post.

Despite my extreme extroversion on the Internet, I actually live in a funny place where I’m continually balancing my innate criticality and training as critical health psychology graduate student with the desire for folks to like me. I see this playing out at conferences like ICED, where people’s opinions of me and my fitness to do this work matter. I am unable to sit in a session and not voice my perspectives on Twitter, but I’m also continually filtering … Continue reading →

The Research-Practice Gap in Eating Disorder Treatment

The approaches used in clinical practice to treat patients often lag behind the most up-to-date developments in research. It can take a long time to integrate scientific findings into clinical practice. This, of course, is not limited to eating disorders or even mental health issues. This so-called “science-practice gap” exists for many reasons, which vary depending on the medical discipline.

This issue, though, seems particularly bad when it comes to eating disorder treatment.

There’s the issue of conducting good studies – how do we determine what is efficacious? That’s a complicated task. What is “recovery” and how long is long-enough for follow-up? Is what we consider to be efficacious really efficacious or just slightly better than the rest?

Then there’s the training: mental health seems to be undervalued in medical school curricula for one, but even more importantly: “Clinicians tend to give more weight to their personal experiences than to … Continue reading →