How do doctors treat starvation?

As deaths from starvation in the Gaza Strip continue to rise, experts say there’s no easy way out of the crisis due to the medical complexity of treating severe malnutrition

As deaths from starvation in the Gaza Strip continue to rise, experts say there’s no easy way out of the crisis due to the medical complexity of treating severe malnutrition.

More than 160 people — at least 90 of them children — have died of malnutrition since the war began, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

The world’s leading body on hunger, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), says that nearly all of Gaza is suffering a food security crisis or worse, and more than half of the population is in the “emergency” or “catastrophe” phase of starvation — which means recovering isn’t as simple as giving starving people food.

Rather, giving food to people experiencing such an extreme degree of starvation could kill them, experts say.

“If you do what the body wants to do, which is to just drink and eat as much as possible the minute you see food, you can actually create these permanent imbalances that can cause things like heart failure or organ damage, because the body had to adapt to get to that starvation mode,” NBC News medical contributor Dr. Kavita Patel, an internal medicine doctor, said.