An anthropologist could study bulimia nervosa using the ethnomedical approach. The ethnomedical approach uses a variety of methods to study diseases. It uses explanatory models of health, descriptions of healing, comparisons of health systems, and health seeking behaviors within a culture to study how diseases affect individuals in a given culture. The ethnomedical approach can be very useful when studying bulimia nervosa because bulimia is a disease that is very much connected to the culture of the individuals affected by the disease. Many cultural factors, such as the idea of beauty in a given culture, can affect how bulimia affects the individuals of that culture. There are three domains of culture that need to be understood to apply the ethnomedical approach to study a disease: infrastructure which is the domain of material and economic culture, structure which is the domain of social organization, power, and interpersonal relationships, and substructure which is the domain of symbols, cognitive models and ideology. It is extremely important to contextualize an illness within a given cultural system because illnesses affect cultures in different ways based on the culture of the individual. Many people in western culture, if they do seek help for bulimia, consult the professional sector, such as medical doctors and psychiatrists, to aid in their treatment for bulimia nervosa. Many medical professionals these days are experts in treating and studying individuals who suffer from bulimia nervosa as well as other eating disorders as well. Most treatments for bulimia involve inpatient care including consultation with a psychiatrist and a dietician to help improve the various damages that can be caused by the effects of bulimia on an individual’s body. In the case of treating bulimia nervosa, it is important that the medical professionals understand that bulimia nervosa is not a disease that only affects the physical body but also the status of the mind and that therapy is used to treat the mental damage caused by tendencies of bulimia. The anthropological perspective of study can be very useful in understanding bulimia nervosa because of its understanding of culture and how culture can affect the way an illness can affect an individual within a given cultural system and how even though a disease may be the same, it will not affect individuals the same way across cultures, especially in the case of eating disorders. If it is not understood how culture influences the way diseases affect individuals in different cultures, diseases can be misdiagnosed and even mistreated.