Alternative medicine: Alive and well, naturally

Doctors told Jo Metcalfe she had an incurable disease, but alternative medicine saved her life. Now the former nurse is on a mission: to teach the world about holistic healing. Clare Dwyer Hogg reports

"I'll never ever forget one tiny nurse looking up at me and telling me to get on with my work, when I was actually holding someone's hand who was sobbing his heart out." It may have happened 20 years ago, but this is Jo Metcalfe's abiding memory of working as a nurse for the NHS. "I remember feeling quite disillusioned." Metcalfe pauses. "Well, not so much disillusioned as very saddened. I went into nursing because of contact and patient care, but there didn't seem to be much time for that." Metcalfe is 36, and hasn't worked in an environment of "orthodox medicine" (her terminology) since then. Instead, she is a natural health practitioner: a purveyor of "holistic care" who treats patients with forms of health care that she sees as viable alternatives to drugs. This type of practice is not unusual, of course. Aromotherapy, homeopathic remedies and reflexology are not regarded as weird and wacky, as they might have been 20 years ago. What is different about Metcalfe, though, is that she had a serious illness herself, and credits unorthodox treatment for being alive today.

Soon after the reprimand from the nurse on her ward, Metcalfe was diagnosed with aplastic anaemia – a rare disorder that occurs when the bone marrow stops producing blood. The diagnosis came about by accident, when she asked a family friend who was a GP to take a blood test to check that she wasn't mildly anaemic. When the results came back, her haemoglobin levels were at seven, when they should have been somewhere between nine and 12. Had this gone undetected, she would have died. "They were absolutely staggered, when they realised my blood count, that I was still capable of working," she says. Her disease was deemed incurable, and at the age of 19 everything in Metcalfe's life became secondary to trying to survive.

It would be too easy to mark this as the starting point for Metcalfe's search for alternative treatment. Technically it was not: she was immediately admitted to hospital, and began an intensive routine within the NHS – or, as she calls it, on the merry-go-round of orthodox medicine. The ride wasn't much fun: as well as steroids and other strong drugs, she took two types of birth-control pill to stop her periods (otherwise the bleeding from menstruation would have been difficult to stop) and had regular blood transfusions. For the majority of the 18 months after diagnosis, Metcalfe was in hospital. "I was losing so much blood," she says, "that I had to have blood transfusions every two or three weeks."

The experts dealt with the problem according to their knowledge at the time, but with hindsight, Metcalfe feels that they treated the illness in a very negative manner. "Because they couldn't isolate the fundamental reasons why my body was behaving as it was, they tried to inhibit the small amount of blood production that I did have, in order to knock it out completely and kick-start the bone marrow."

Acupuncture was a route she tried only after the medical team working with her had run out of options; she had almost had a stroke when she tried to go without a transfusion for five weeks, and the veins all around her wrists and hands had broken down. Considering her relationship with needles had not been a positive one to date (at that stage she had a central line sticking out of her chest, which went directly into her main heart blood vessels) it seemed like something of a desperate measure. But when she walked out of the first consultation she caught her image in a mirror and noticed to her shock that she "looked pink". That means nothing to people who are healthy, but for someone who went in to the session exhausted by the exertion of walking a few steps from her car, it felt like a breakthrough. "All I can say is that within a very short space of time, I was recovering from an incurable disease," she says.

It was a gradual, not a miraculous, recovery, but it was a time of epiphany, too. She realised that it wasn't just a case of alleviating the symptoms – the part of illness that "orthodox" medicine focuses on – but of looking at the condition while acknowledging the "whole person". Phrases like this are often linked in with dubious ways of making people "feel better", but Metcalfe says her approach is eminently practical. "Instead of taking a painkiller for a headache, a practitioner like myself would ask why you were getting a headache in the first place. Is it due to your spine needing alignment, or because you're eating something that doesn't agree with you, or dehydration?" she asks. It is, she asserts, about a process – and involving the individual who is experiencing ill health in that process, too.

She found this holistic approach hugely beneficial when when it came to tackling her own illness. "I found that I was able to be proactive, rather than sitting there with a piece of plastic in my mouth. Natural medicine brings out the body's own healing capacity.

"The other thing to bear in mind is that serious ill health never comes along as a result of one particular thing happening, unless you're run over by a bus or something," she asserts. "At the time that I got ill, I had poor eating habits, a suicidal friend, a very negative boyfriend, was getting very little sleep, and had high stress levels." (When she was younger, she had also been exposed to the insecticide Lindane, which has since been linked with bone-marrow problems.)

"Lots of different things come into play," she says. "Therefore it is not likely that one drug will sort everything out. Unless you learn what has caused the problem, you'll find yourself in the same situation again."

Prevention, then, is the key for Metcalfe, both in her clinic, and for her "mobile stress-busting" teams, which set up shop in offices, using alternative practices to combat bad health and absenteeism. In the last company that employed her teams, Metcalfe calculates that she reduced sick days by 50 per cent, and that the high staff turnover dropped by 10 per cent. She insists she is not against the orthodox way of doing things, but that in the future both approaches should be integrated. "What will happen," she hopes, "is that the GP will have a really good working knowledge of eight of the main natural therapies. There will be an initial consultation, and the patient will be sent to the homeopath, or aromatherapist, or whatever is required. Surgery will only be a last resort."

It may sound improbable to some, but these are the words of a mother who was told 20 years ago that her disease was incurable, and that even if she were to survive, she'd never be able to have children. Given this experience, maybe anything is possible after all.

Jo Metcalfe's practice can be contacted on 01284 747105 or at www.holistic-living.com