Treatment for Starvation?

Factual Questions
1

I am reading Hungry Ghosts, a history of the 1958-62 famine in China which killed about 30 million people. Just the thing to put one down in the dumps. Really depressing.

The author mentions some sort of medico giving aid to starving people. We are talking real concentration camp stuff here, walking skeletons. He shoots them up with some sort of a saline solution and offers them bean broth. Seems like a reasonable course of action. The book claims that the patients’ stomaches ‘exploded.’

First off, is this possible?

Second off, what would be an apt treatment for a person in this condition? What if I did not have a hospital nearby, what would be reasonable ‘first aid’ steps I could take with no elaborate equipment?

This is really disturbing. (Sigh)

2

I believe the proper treatment for long-term starvation is to feed bland, easily digestible, nutritious food in sall amounts, gradually increasing the amounts over a period of time to a normal calorific intake. Apparently feeding normal quantities of food to someone in ‘walking skeleton’ condition can cause all sorts of unpleasant system upsets, although I’ve not hear of stomachs exploding before - I’ll leave that to a medical professional.

So you best bet would be to feed them a little bit more than they had to eat the day before, and keep that up until they you got up to three squares a day. If you had access to better supplies, then Merck tells you all you need to know.

You might also want to read The Great Starvation Experiment

3

Saline to relieve dehydration.

Start with light liquids to get digestive system working. Gradually build up quantity and quality.

Prisioners of the War Between The States were often in nearly similar condition upon returning home. A few died from over eating!

4

During starvation, large parts of your digestive system just shuts down since it’s not needed and it’s a waste of resources. Lots of lovely enzymes and such are normally produced and it takes awhile for all those systems go get working again.

My WAG concerns the beans. Many beans are actually hard to digest. Some even require a “pre-cooking” boil to get rid of poisonous stuff. Note how infamous the breakdown products of beans in the digestive system are. I suspect that the normal enzymes that would have safely broken down the bean soup in the stomach were absent. Other abnormal digestive processes proceeded. Gas built up. The stomach linings were very thin…

(I have an uncle who was a POW in Germany in WWII. After liberation he was told who much to eat, etc. He was smart enough to obey. Others went thru the line twice and paid for that.)