The Finest Quality Snake Oil: Mandometer(r) Treatment for Eating Disorders – Part I

PROTIP: When selling your snake oil treatment, try NOT to make wildly outrageous efficacy claims. But if you can’t resist that temptation, try to limit your hard-to-believe, eye-roll-inducing claims to your treatment — there’s no need to go further.

In this post, I’m going to give a brief history of the Mandometer® treatment and its apparent rationale. In the next one or two posts, I will do an analysis of the most recently study by the group that claims to show remission rates of 75% and relapse rates of only 10%. Sounds great, right? Well… we’ll see.

We suggest that the reason self-starving patients do not fit the DSM-IV criteria of anorexia nervosa is because there is in fact no psychopathological basis of the disorder … The DSM-IV offers no definition [of psychopathology], but it is reasonable to assume that a psychopathological basis of anorexia nervosa would be reflected

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