SPRINGFIELD -- Anorexia nervosa, bulimia, binge eating, and starvation dieting: Laura Daly is recovering, not from any of those eating disorders but from a lifetime of misdiagnosis. She was starving to death but it wasn't her fault.

"This was sixth grade, when I really started ballooning up in weight," said Laura as she looked through some photos recently. "I guess I didn't really think much about it at that age."

Like a lot of young girls, by junior high school, Laura Daly was being forced to think about her weight.

"You could tell the whispering behind the back in gym class because I was bigger than everybody else,” she said.

Two years later, Laura says the whispering had changed, and so had she.

"Yes, in high school I lost 60 pounds,” she said.

That was almost half her body weight. It was the beginning of what would turn into nearly a decade of accusations from school counselors, classmates, and even complete strangers who were convinced Laura was starving herself to be thin.

“Everybody would look at me. I was even stopped at the grocery store by a man the day before Christmas who said, ‘I know what's wrong with you.’ I just started bawling and walked out,” she said.

Today, it's estimated up to 10 million girls and young women in the United States are starving themselves to death because of eating disorders like anorexia nervosa. Laura says she was never one of them, although she knew for years she had a big problem.

"I knew I couldn't digest foods everyone else was eating, and I couldn't understand why.”

Laura says a very low fat diet was the only way she could avoid chronic diarrhea and/or constipation. By the time she was 15, she and her parents started turning to doctors for some answers.

"It's a family experience that's been heart wrenching," said Marilyn Daley, Laura’s mother.

A dozen different doctors over nearly a decade kept coming to the same conclusion.

“They all just thought I was anorexic,” said Steve Daly, Laura’s father. "After awhile, you start to get desperate. You're not getting answers that fit what you're seeing."

"You would sit right there at same table. You see her eat, don't see her run to the bathroom; she doesn't hide things out and never did, she doesn't complain, so it didn't fit that, being an anorexic,” said Marilyn.

It was a constant frustration that followed Laura through college, where she graduated in 2003, and into her career as an interior designer. That's when she lost another 20 pounds, along with her job and her fiancé.

"I didn't know what to do. I was almost losing hope,” said Laura.

With her weight continuing to drop, now below 70 pounds, Laura knew she was running out of time.

It was almost by accident that her mother found a possible explanation for Laura's condition online. A doctor in Pennsylvania reported success in treating women who had been misdiagnosed with eating disorders. It was enough to immediately send the Dalys to Pennsylvania for a common test on Laura's gall bladder -- a test administered in a very uncommon way by keeping the patient upright during the scan.

“Here's the liver, here's the gall bladder, in some people it's not attached so when they stand up it falls over and there's the kink," said Dr. William Smedley, the doctor in Pennsylvania.

Dr. Jose Dominguez, a surgeon in Springfield who hasn't treated or examined Laura, says it's an unfamiliar technique.

"I don't hear about that in medical literature. Can there conceivably be an anatomical reason the gall bladder's not attached well to a liver and can flip over and not empty when the body asks it to empty when food is going through the stomach? I can theoretically see that as a possibility,” said Dominguez.

For Laura, gall bladder surgery was the cure. She says recovery has been slow but she's managed to regain 40 pounds. Now it's become her mission to help other young girls who may be suffering from a misdiagnosis.

"If there is anything physically going wrong where you have digestive issues, get your gall bladder checked out!" She said.

If you would like to know more about Laura's story, she's written a book entitled "Anorexia Misdiagnosed." She also has a Web site with a link to Smedley's Web site, where you can take a test online to see if your symptoms might indicate chronic gall bladder disease.