Inquest told doctors were tricked by anorexic patient
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Your support makes all the difference.The desperate deceptions practised by anorexics were revealed yesterday when the father of a 21-year-old who starved herself to death spoke of her "mental torture".
At the inquest into her death this week, doctors who had been keeping Julia Duffy under 24-hour observation admitted they had been gullible and deceived by the young woman.
Yesterday, her father, Paul, said she would hide heavy objects in her clothes on "weigh-in" days and drink water to inflate her bulk. She even developed a way of grasping the scales with her toes to apply pressure and distort the readings. Her heart eventually gave out and she died in hospital weighing 4st (25kg).
Mr Duffy, 54, said: "She was a highly intelligent person but her life was very painful when it came to food. She was in mental torment all the time. She was self-obsessed and knew to the last ounce what she was eating and what it would do to her body.
"You just can't understand it at first. You thought she should get on with it, stop playing around and eat. But the illness distorted reality and appeared to be a friend to her. But [it] was really a deadly enemy, she was frightened to think of life without it. It was in some ways a control thing. She wanted to be in charge.
"Julia was chronically ill, but the help she got was a mish-mash and the lack of knowledge of the medical profession was a regular feature. On an overall level there was a lack of co-ordination. Although a lot of health authority money was spent, some of it was wasted."
The condition first began to show when Ms Duffy was 12. Within a year she was so thin that her parents took her out of Bristol Grammar School and moved her to the Merrifield specialist unit in Taunton, Somerset.
Mr Duffy said his daughter was shipped "from pillar to post" over the next eight years, but nobody succeeded in getting through to her.
By the age of 17, she had become violent when anyone tried to help her eat and doctors at the specialist unit had to sedate her before they could hook her up to a drip-feed.
Over the past two years she had been transferred back and forth between St Mary's Hospital and the Florence Nightingale Hospital, but consistently refused to eat anything more than enough to keep her alive.
At the inquest into her death at Westminster Coroner's Court on Wednesday, doctors admitted they were tricked by her methods, while agency nurses caring for her changed so often that she saw 44 different ones in 46 days.
Richard Lancaster, a consultant at St Mary's, said: "In ordinary medicine one is not used to a patient deceiving about their weight. I bargained with her each time that she would not need to be tube-fed if she gained a certain amount of weight and that is what she seemed to be doing."
Ms Duffy, of Henleaze, Bristol, slipped into a coma on 10 March. Anthony Barton, the deputy coroner, recorded a verdict that she died the following day of broncho-pneumonia due to anorexia.
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