Failure of the medical system?

I hesitated a bit to blog on this for a variety of reasons, the major ones being a) the death of Michael Jackson has been a wee bit over-publicized and b) I don't like gossip and accusations. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that what I had to say was less about the King of Pop and more about people with eating disorders in general.

To be honest, I don't know whether Michael Jackson had an eating disorder, or body dysmorphia, or addiction problems. Perhaps the final autopsy will have some of those answers, and perhaps we may never fully know what happened. But a recent editorial (working on the assumption that all three were true) said that the medical system had failed Michael Jackson.

Most people with eating disorders don't have the kind of fame and money that MJ had, but perhaps family and friends and medical professionals still fell sway to the same assumptions that MJ's doctors might have. MJ was dancing and rehearsing and performing- he couldn't be that bad. I had straight As and a research position and scholarships - I couldn't be that bad. This is, maybe, fame and fortune of a type. People held my academic and musical accomplishments in awe. Though I would be the first to dispute the accuracy of that, I will also admit that these achievements gave a lot of people plenty of reasons to overlook the oh-so-minor detail that I wasn't eating.

Writes Mark Rubi in his editorial:

Time and again, these pillars of American society reacted to a starving patient with prescription drugs.

I'm not anti- prescription drugs- just look in my medical cabinet and you'll see quite an array. And any toxicologist will tell you that the dose tends to kill you, much less than the drug itself. That being said, maybe what MJ needed was someone to say screw the fame, you need to eat. The medication he may have been most in need of was food. But people may have been afraid to say something because of the fame, afraid of what that might mean. Maybe some of my professors and supervisors were afraid of what my wasted frame might mean. Maybe they just didn't know. Or maybe they thought I could see the problem and would ultimately do something about it.

And that is the biggest failure of the medical system when it comes to eating disorders: that we expect people to want to get better and to do everything possible to recover. But in the acute stages of anorexia especially, the sufferer is almost unable to perceive his/her condition accurately. Either I truly didn't think I had a problem or I didn't think starving myself was problematic, or it wasn't that serious. I wasn't, like, emaciated or anything (except, oops, I was). If a high school valedictorian got cancer, we wouldn't wait for her to will herself well. But most medical professionals were quite content to do that when I developed anorexia.

Did the medical system fail MJ? Perhaps. But sadly, perhaps no worse than many other people with eating disorders have been failed.