The Internet is being blamed by researchers in the U.S. for exacerbating the problems of anorexia and bulimia in young people.
According to a new pilot study by researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford, children as young as 10 are learning new weight loss or purging methods from web sites that promote eating disorders.
It seems the growing number of Internet chat rooms dedicated to perpetuating the illnesses encourages users to share tips, such as what drugs induce vomiting and what Internet sites sell them.
All too often the young victims of anorexia and bulimia are trying to hide their eating problems from their parents and doctors, and are turning to web sites aimed at helping them recover, to learn new high-risk ways to lose weight from each other.
The study author Rebecka Peebles, an adolescent medicine and eating disorder specialist says parents and doctors need to realize that the Internet is essentially an unmonitored media forum, and it is not possible to completely control the content of an interactive site.
In the period between 2001 and 2003 pro-eating disorder sites began appearing on the Internet and despite attempts to remove them many pro-anorexia and bulimia sites remain accessible and most users are able to find them and pro-recovery sites by doing chance searches.
Some of the reported conversations on pro-anorexia chat rooms are extremely worrying especially when quite young people talk of buying drugs off the Internet to induce vomiting.