It's odd that it took over a century between the first recognition of anorexia as a medical illness to the first specific use of food as therapy. I'm not talking the idea that people with eating disorders ultimately need to eat (though I'm sure this, too, was revolutionary at a point in time), but that food could be medicine.

For over 100 years, this idea was really overlooked. What else could we be missing?

Although I don't have an answer specific to the ED world, the field of addition and alcohol abuse might have some interesting new leads. A new book out by a recovering alcoholic and renowned cardiac surgeon speaks of his recovery thanks to a drug called baclofen. Baclofen isn't a new drug, nor was it developed for use in addictions. The drug is actually a muscle relaxant, and works on the brain's GABA receptors to increase levels of GABA in the brain. In this manner, it provides many of the similar anxiolytic properties of alcohol in much the same way.

Several years ago, a case series (a series of case studies of addicts who were treated with baclofen) appeared in the medical journals, with seemingly promising results. Later studies--both in humans and in mice--showed mixed results. But our alcoholic cardiologist either didn't know or didn't care. Down and out and headed even further down, he got a friend to prescribe him baclofen* and found that his cravings for alcohol had disappeared.

Olivier Ameisen, the cardiologist in question, wrote a book about his experiences called "The End of My Addiction," which was reviewed on the wonderful blog Neurotopia. While the review is interesting (and provided much of the background information here), it is the ending that really got me thinking about the parallels to the field of eating disorders

The book ends in bafflement that more studies are not taking advantage of what could be the cure addiction researchers have been looking for for years.

And I also wonder, why not? The book was published very recently, and I still haven't heard of a large scale clinical trial for baclofen (though I could have missed it, of course). The drug appears relatively safe in high doses (as is known through its use in treating muscle spasms), and appears to provide relief from both the craving and the anxiety that drug users experience. What is going wrong?

Ameisen proposes one theory. He believes that, since baclofen is an old drug and no longer under patent, drug companies will never fund a large scale clinical trial. There's no money in it. He may very well be right. But I've got another theory. Most researchers who work in addiction know that addiction is a disease. It's something that you simply cannot cure through an exercise of will. It's not a problem with will power or lack of faith. And though we all know this, I wonder how many addiction researchers really believe it. A lot of the resistance that Ameisen encountered was from people who could give no real reason as to why they weren't interested in a clinical trial. Could it have been the concept of a cure? The idea that you just take a pill and make it go away? It is possible that, even though we all know that alcoholism and other kinds of drug abuse are diseases that cost the public billions of dollars per year, that society has still made up believe in will power. That we think, at some level, that addicts should suffer for what they have done. Ameisen had no suffering. He just stopped. Is our society ready to accept that kind of a cure?

I don't think that most people in the field of EDs think that people need to "suffer" because of their illness. I have yet to meet a specialist who wasn't ultimately compassionate and didn't want people to get better. However, instead of feeling that people need to "suffer," the mentality is that people need to "figure it out" in order to get better.

It's true- some people do "figure it out" and get better and if you're an adult, that's the most researched option we've got. But are we so busy trying to figure out causes and effects that we could be missing a cure that's right underneath our noses?

*I don't know what potential for abuse this drug has, but if it's being used to treat addictions, I'll bet it's fairly low. But you never know.