Why Specialized Eating Disorder Care is Worth Traveling For
What if the help you need for an eating disorder isn’t nearby? And what if the help that is nearby isn’t enough?
Leaving home for treatment can feel like a lot to ask. You may be weighing whether the travel is worth it, whether you could just work with your regular therapist or family doctor, or whether it’s even worth trying again after a program that didn’t really understand eating disorders already let you down.
Eating disorders are complex, multifactorial illnesses, and healing from one takes specialized, multidisciplinary expertise that isn’t available everywhere. That’s worth understanding before you rule anything out—including the option of going a little farther for care that actually fits what you’re facing.
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Most providers were never trained to recognize an eating disorder
Due to gaps in education and training, even compassionate, well-meaning providers often overlook the warning signs of an eating disorder. More than 80% of U.S. medical residency programs offer no formal training in eating disorders, and internal medicine residents who receive any training average under two hours of it over three years. The same holds for most master’s-level therapy and dietetic programs (Project Heal). Across medicine, nursing, and even nutrition, professionals consistently report low confidence in identifying and assisting those with eating disorders. As a result, an estimated 50% to 80% of people who present with an eating disorder in primary care go undetected or misdiagnosed.
Eating disorders are brain-based illnesses shaped by a mix of biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors, and they affect people of every gender, race, age, body size, and background. They manifest across a range of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and fall into five primary diagnoses: anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID), and Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder (OSFED). The same diagnosis can look completely different from one person to the next, often without any visible signs, and usually alongside a co-occurring condition like anxiety, depression, or PTSD. Pervasive stereotypes, diet culture, and a general lack of public awareness make the complexity of eating disorders even easier to miss.
Eating disorders require a specialized approach
For most health problems, a visit to one specialist will do. You see an orthopedist for a knee injury, a dermatologist for a rash. Eating disorders don’t work that way. They simultaneously affect the body, the mind, and a person’s daily life and relationships—the medical, the psychiatric, the psychological, and the nutritional—which means no single provider can treat one in isolation.
Lasting recovery takes a coordinated team trained specifically in eating disorders: a therapist to work through the thoughts and emotions beneath the illness and build coping skills, a psychiatric provider to manage co-occurring conditions and medication (when needed), a dietitian to help rebuild a flexible and balanced relationship with eating, and a medical provider to monitor the physical health effects—from cardiovascular to gastrointestinal to endocrine. In a specialized program, this multidisciplinary team shares a comprehensive treatment plan and communicates directly with each other, so your care stays connected rather than falling solely on you or a single provider to hold it all together.
Specialized also means evidence-based. Eating disorder recovery responds best to vetted, patient-centered interventions. At The Emily Program, our care draws on evidence-based approaches: Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for ARFID (CBT-AR), family and community-of-support interventions, including Family-Based Treatment (FBT), and therapeutic, supported meals. These approaches work best when they’re delivered by a multidisciplinary team that understands them deeply and applies them at the right level of care, for the right length of time, with particular attention to continuity of care. A clinician can’t offer a modality they weren’t trained in and don’t practice, whether or not it suits the person and illness in front of them. A specialized team starts with your specific needs and tailors the right approach to you.
The right care may be closer than you think
Few question the decision to drive across a state line for the right heart surgeon. When the illness is serious, and the required expertise is specialized, we treat the trip as obvious—people cross state lines to reach the Mayo Clinic, to seek out the one place or specialist that treats their condition day in and day out. Eating disorders are medically serious and specific, too. As a society, we just haven’t always extended the same instinct to mental health.
Nearly 30 million Americans will have an eating disorder in their lifetime, but specialized treatment is unevenly distributed, concentrated in some regions and nearly absent in others. It’s hardest to reach in rural and under-resourced areas, where higher levels of care can be especially scarce. For some families, the nearest program with real clinical depth is in another state.
Here’s the good news: that care may be closer than you think. The Emily Program offers a full continuum of care—inpatient, residential, day treatment (PHP/IOP), and outpatient programming—across 14+ treatment centers in six states: Minnesota, Washington, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population lives within an eight-hour drive of one of our locations. And because of our full continuum, you can move between levels of care as your needs change, without having to start over with a new treatment provider.
Get help now
At The Emily Program, we believe specialized eating disorder care should exist in every community, for everyone who needs it, and we’re working toward a world where that’s the reality. In the meantime, if you need to travel to reach the care you need, it’s worth the trip.
If you or someone you love is living with an eating disorder, you deserve care from people who truly understand what you’re experiencing. There’s no referral necessary to begin care at The Emily Program, and our assessments are often available within the same week. Take the first step by completing our online form or calling 1-888-364-5977.