ABSTRACT
The idea that health care intervention is based on objective knowledge is central within western medicine and, with the vigorous embrace of the evidence-based approach, this assumption has never been stronger. However, post-structuralist and social constructionist analyses demonstrate that medical intervention (see also Surtees, Throsby, Epston and Maisel, all this volume) like health and illness themselves (see Eckermann, Malson and Burns, both this volume), is socially constructed and culturally situated. Psychiatric interventions used in the treatment of eating disorders perhaps betray their cultural antecedents most starkly because the relationship between the `helped' and the `helper' is especially gendered: most patients are young women and girls and senior treating psychiatrists, at least until fairly recently, are typically older men.
