Green Health Watch subscriber Diana Samways trained as a conventional doctor, then found herself on the receiving end due to considerable ill health. She found the advice and treatments offered well intended but often misguided, and the whole experience disempowering. It was only when she took back responsibility for her illness and designed her own self-help therapies with the help of some exceptional holistic doctors that she recovered. She now specialises in allergy and environmental medicine, drug-free wherever possible, and with the emphasis on self help.

The reader is encouraged to treat doctors more like plumbers than gods by staying in control of any treatment undergone. She explains the preventative and whole body approach of environmental medicine and repeats some of the self-help advice she and her environmental colleagues have given for dealing with the vast array of modern illnesses for which orthodox medicine has little (or, in her opinion, the wrong) answer.

From issues as diverse as irritable bowel syndrome and Gulf War syndrome to carpets and dying well at home, and from treating allergies and the common cold to hauntings and HRT, Diana has strong, sometimes radical views, and puts them in an almost breathless rush that makes her book hard to put down. She makes no apology for not backing up her views with lists of incomprehensible references to research studies which, actually, usually prove very little. Her hope is that the reader will follow her self-help example, keep or take back control for any illness and, well, try out strategies that worked for her patients.

Of particular interest to me were the two chapters on the role of moulds in illness, an issue to which far too little attention has been paid. It would be difficult to exaggerate the value of this book.

Nick Anderson

Chapters
1. I'm under the doctor - get me out of here
2. Conventional western medicine - The surgeon and the Pill Fairy
3. There is an alternative way - holistic medicine
4. The importance of a healthy digestive system for good general health
5. Irritable bowel syndrome
6. Mould and other inhalant allergies
7. More about moulds
8. Houses, hauntings, underground water and electricity
9. Multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) and Gulf War Syndrome
10. Virus infections and shortening the duration of a cold
11. Adult children of alcoholics and other emotionally-challenged families
12. Alcoholism and addiction
13. Allergy and addiction - the crossover
14. Staying healthy in later life and avoiding the Pill Fairy
15. Spiritual growth and the purpose of life
16. On dying well at home
17. Electronic medicine - the pharmacy of the future?
18. The European Food Supplements Directive
19. The alternative pharmacy and home first aid kit
20. Practical solutions to common problems
21. Why I have written this book

Further reading
Useful information
Translating food packaging
Entrainment of brain waves by pulsed signals

Self help -
I'm a Patient, Get Me Out of Here! - self-help for common illnesses by Dr Diana Samways MBSS - BOMEDCPATSAM