There are good international standards for treating anorexia and bulimia, and those treatments have reasonable success rates. As I quoted earlier, it's 60% to 65% for anorexia and 75% to 85% for bulimia. These are evidence-based treatments, as much as we can tell. They're described well in the literature, and there are both American and British guidelines to support their use. They simply aren't available in most parts of the country, or at least they're not covered.
The gold standard outpatient treatment for bulimia nervosa is cognitive behavioural therapy. It's virtually impossible to find a physician to deliver that because physicians are not trained to do it. It's provided by psychologists, who are not covered by provincial health care plans. It costs $180 to $200 an hour. A course of treatment costs about $5,000. People won't pay that.
People with more than trivial illness with anorexia need to be in hospital. They need to be in a day hospital program. It's not that we don't know what to do; those services simply aren't available. Again, we know what to do about prostate cancer, but there were only three clinics in Ontario for all the guys with prostate cancer. We knew what the treatment was, but there were no services.
We need to develop new treatments. We're at the forefront of developing new treatments in neurostimulation here in Toronto, and there is urgent need to work on those new treatments. But for your garden variety anorexia or bulimia, we know what to do; it just isn't available.