[DanaC]

I had my own experience of the koolaid brigade when I was a kid, and it took quite a long time for me to stop feeling angry about it. Our lovely, caring, dedicated and understanding family doctor, in desperation at what to do with a 12 year old whose scalp-to-toe severe eczema was not responding to any treatment, and was in fact becoming dangerously bad, who was also unable to keep food or water down without vomiting, and who was losing weight at a dramatic rate, clearly didn't trust hospitals because he advised us instead to go see a friend of his who was pioneering a new treatment.

It cost my parents thousands of pounds, traumatised me (and them) beyond belief, and I am convinced to this day would have eventually killed me had we not decided to jump off the merry-go-round when we did.

What should have happened, looking back, was an extended course of strong antibiotics. My skin was coming off in sheets, because of infection, not because I needed innoculating against household dust and apple pectin and thousands of other common substances.

The testing process alone took four weeks, and had them sticking needles in me every 10-20 minutes, all day five days a week, relying on my descriptions of how ill, or itchy I felt to come to whatever concentration of substance they figured would 'switch off' the allergic response. Try this: sit in a chair, after someone has given you an injection which might cause you to feel a physiological response, such as itchiness, headache, nausea, irritability etc, for 20 minutes, without reading, talking, or watching television. Just sit there and focus on how your body feels. Then keep doing that over and over, having injections and tracking improvements to the symptoms you've detected, or worsenings of the symptoms you've detected. Do that all day. How accurate are those descriptions going to be?

Now do that, sitting in a room with 7 other people, who are all also silently monitoring their symptoms, whilst being given injections every 20 minutes.

But - before you do that, you should listen to a lecture by an expert about how allergies can prompt the body to experience symptoms of almost any illness or disease. And how this process will allow you to take control of your own body. That the success of the cure depends on your committment to it.

Oh, and you should also, to get the full feel of the experience, be told in no uncertain terms that it is a very good thing you came to them when you did, because your body is breaking down under the onslaught of toxins it cannot cope with and that had you left it any longer you may well have died.

Now recall that in this story you are 12 years old. And now add in the eminent doctor's partner - a brusque, no nonsense woman in very expensive, tailored suits who cajoles and at times outright bullies you into compliance and considers any failure of the medicine to be a failure of the patient to properly commit. She's wholly evangelical about the treatment, and is quite intimidating.

Now do that five days a week, for four weeks. And follow it up with daily injections, a strictly comtrolled diet, food diaries and symptom diaries, and first weekly, then monthly consultation visits for about the next 7 months, all the while with no improvement in the illness that took you there.

If anything, surprise surprise, I was getting worse. Doctor F -- and his partner lost patience with me when it became clear there would be no follow-up photograph to go with the 'before' photo he'd taken of me for his book.



It was all cloaked in the most respectable looking science and medicine. His surgery, when we first went, was on the street in Manchester where all the really high up consultants are. And we were referred to him by a doctor we trusted.


I still think sometimes about some of the other patients in that room. One of them was a woman, not sure her age, who was crippled by multiple sclerosis, and whose husband had to carry her up and down the stairs to the treatment room. I wonder how many thousands of pounds they took from her.
Oh .... sorry, turns out I am still quite angry :P