Article: NHS plans to give youngsters suffering anorexia palliative care instead of treatment should be ripped up

From Sept 2023,

"NHS plans to give youngsters suffering anorexia palliative care instead of treatment should be ripped up, a leading campaigner has said.

Leaked documents which emerged over the weekend revealed patients as young as 18 may be placed on a “palliative pathway”, which focuses on prioritising quality of life rather than recovery through re-feeding."

https://london-post.co.uk/nhs-plans...are-instead-of-treatment-should-be-ripped-up/

Original, but paywalled, article, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...ients-nhs-guidance-palliative-care-treatment/

 

From Sept as well.

Opinion piece in the Guardian, "If I’d been given palliative care when I had an eating disorder, I would not be here today", https://www.theguardian.com/comment...e-care-nhs-patients-eating-disorders-recovery

This story seems to have been rumbling along for a while.

From April 2023,

REVEALED: The anorexia patients abandoned by the NHS because 'they are too sick to treat' with some even referred on for palliative care, https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/news-and-...sorder-patients-being-offered-palliative-care

and from May 2023

RCPsych issues statement on eating disorder patients being offered palliative care, https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/news-and-...sorder-patients-being-offered-palliative-care

 

Thought it was worth posting as, to me, it hints that the attitudes that pwME who have serious eating/digestion issues might be running in to are the same attitudes as experienced by patients in the articles above.

 

I strongly support giving people with anorexia the option of palliative care. People with anorexia are absolutely competent to make their own medical decisions. If you don't feel comfortable eating, you don't feel comfortable eating, and you have the right not to, whether it's due to a mental or physical condition. Force-feeding is barbaric and must be consigned to the history books immediately. It should be handled the same as any other serious condition that interferes with feeding: Provide nutritional support if and when the patient desires.

 

Thanks, I look forward to reading.

Anecdotally I have gained the impression that those with ED have been suffering much of the same abuse as people who self harm or are suicidal and people with Learning Disability, Autistic people with certain support needs or medical conditions that require hospital care.

Whole system needs an ideological reset.

Edit: Read them now. Yeah, this reminds me of the Canadian MAiD bill.

The answer to the fact that the service offered to people with ED had always been punitive cruel and not particularly effective. They could knock it down and build a better service. But looks like they are just going to shut it down.

Force feeding is a horrific practice patients have talked about this torture and the disrespect for their autonomy for many years, advocating for abolition. I think the skint NHS has finally decided to listen. But I am almost certain not for the right reasons.

 

I don't know. With anorexia, there's this extreme push to make people eat. With ME, there's the assumption that you either don't want to eat or mistakenly think you can't. But perhaps the causes are the same if you look at the big picture: Both are the result of people not treating patients with dignity because of the stigma over mental illness. (ME is no more mental than a broken foot, but as long as people believe it's mental, it gets the same stigma, and then some because we're bastards that don't want to get better.)

 

Psychiatry is absolutely, I mean, fundamentally broken when it comes to issues around informed consent. The minute a patient makes a decision psychiatry doesn't like, they're immediately labeled unable to make decisions for themselves. This has no rational basis and no other field operates like this.

In case you haven't noticed, I have extreme anti-psychiatry views. My own experiences led me to that.