Eating Disorders. A Guide to Medical Care and Complications.

State the editors, "Eating Disorders present a challenge to clinicians in terms of diagnosis as well as treatment. Often [patients with them] fall between the cracks, being too medically ill for many psychiatrists and not understood by many primary care physicians... This manuscript has as its main goal a hands-on, user-friendly comprehensive guide to the medical care and complications of eating disorders for primary care clinicians: family physicians, internists, pediatricians, and others... The method is to start each chapter with a series of questions that will be answered in the chapter, to use clinical vignettes where appropriate to give the chapter life and applicability."

Topics discussed in early chapters include: team treatment, medical evaluation of the patient, principles of diagnosis and treatment, and nutritional rehabilitation. Subsequent chapters address potential complications, organized by organ system: gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, gynecological, endocrinological, and oral and dental. The final chapters are concerned with special issues, such as athletes with eating disorders, obesity, medical tests, and health concerns for nonphysicians.

This book will be read by professionals and students in primary care (family medicine, pediatrics) as well as mental health care (psychiatry and psychology).

Philip S. Mehler, M.D., is the chief of general internal medicine at the Denver Health Medical Center and an associate professor of medicine at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. Arnold E. Andersen, M.D., is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa College of Medicine.