Talk Therapy May be Effective, But Don’t Oversimplify

I was reading through articles on ABCNews.com when I came across an article, A Few Months of Talk Therapy Treats Bulimia.

Really?  Is that all it takes?  Just a few short months, and all those suffering with bulimia could be cured?

Upon reading further into the article, I found out what was really going on.  A multi-study review had shown that “bulimia specific talk therapy, also called cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), compared with no treatment, led to cessation of binge eating in about 37 percent of those treated.”

So this is good, bulimia specific CBT is effective in 37 percent of patients.  Not a cure-all by any means, but a positive find.

It turns out that the big finding this article was talking about, is that bulimia specific CBT can be effective in four to five months, as opposed to other psychotherapies which take closer to a year.

The article turned out to be informative, and interesting, but the headline may do more damage than it does good.  The headline makes it seem as though this form of therapy will work, on all patients, in just a few months.  People may wonder why they aren’t cured yet, or why this did not work for them.  And people in their lives may read that, and think that the bulimic person is faking it, because obviously if it were real it would have been cured by CBT.

Perhaps I am putting too much stock into one articles headline.  But I do believe that the word choice was terrible.

Other articles which cited the same multi-study review were titled: Talk Therapy Can Significantly Treat Bulimia, and Bulimia and Binge Eating May Respond to Talk Therapy.

These headlines may not be as concise, but they seem more accurate.

Regardless of poor editing, the main point to take from all three articles is this: “Bulimia nervosa is treatable; that some treatment is better than no treatment; [and] that CBT is associated with the best outcome for bulimia nervosa,” said Cynthia Bulik, PH.D., Director of the University of North Carolina Eating Disorders Program.

Bulik was quoted in all three articles that I’ve mentioned.

Bulik also said: “CBT rests on the premise that unhealthy thoughts lie at both the roots of bulimia nervosa and in the maintenance of unhealthy eating behaviors…The goals of CBT are first to have the patient become his or her own detective and – via self-monitoring – start to understand their patterns of binge eating and purging and recognize and anticipate the cues (triggers) for their unhealthy behaviors”

As great as this find is, it is effective for 37 percent of patients…that leaves the other 63 percent.  I just think we need better results than that before we can say that “a few months of talk therapy treats bulimia.”