Therapeutic nutrition with tube feeding.

Abstract

That food is necessary for life is an ancient and well-known biological fact. Yet in clinical medicine this principle is too often inadequately applied, to the extent that starvation in the wards of modern hospitals is not uncommon even at a time when, beset by disease, the patient can least afford the consequences of deficits due to undernutrition. Though the gastrointestinal tract is intact and digestion unimpaired, it is obvious that the offering of an adequate diet is no guarantee of its acceptance. Indeed, because of anorexia or of mechanical impediments to chewing or swallowing, normal enteral alimentation is often the exception rather than the rule. The one obvious method for meeting this problem is the employment of satisfactory tube feeding. PREVIOUS WORK Forced feeding of some undescribed type is known to have been practiced in Greco-Roman times.1In 1617, Aquapendente2wrote on the subject of tubal alimentation