Abstract
It is essential that patients with eating disorders receive psychotherapy for acquisition of sufficient coping skills. However, eating disorders are frequently accompanied with lethal malnutrition, serious complications, and difficulties in family or social life. Therefore, patients with eating disorders require collaboration from a variety of medical departments, including emergency, internal medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics, psychosomatic medicine, and psychiatry departments, as well as primary-care physicians, therapists, dietitians, social workers and other collaborators through long-term consultations in schools or workplaces. Patients with eating disorders often repudiate to have eating disorders, appear dissociation of personalities, and suffer from starvation-induced psychological symptoms, which can disrupt the collaborative treatment. To improve the efficacy of collaborative treatment in a medical team, the doctor responsible for care should supply information using a digital chart system, and inform all staffs of the collective treatment plan. Primary-care physicians or other collaborators outside of a medical team experience difficulties in the school or workplace due to their abnormal attitudes. Therefore, if they can receive accurate information about the disease and the skills necessary to take care of patients, they can benefit treatment for eating disorders. Collaboration between physicians, specialists and other collaborators in the treatment of eating disorders might reduce the psychological burden of themselves and caregivers.
