What Doctors Don’t Tell You. Lynne McTaggart

       Introduction

      This book was born from a grand passion I once had: a passion to get better.

      In the early eighties, after an extraordinary patch of bad choices, I underwent a prolonged bout of stress. In every profoundly important area of my life, green lights I’d always taken for granted suddenly began turning red. If I had taken one of those little tests you find in women’s magazines that add up your stress quotient – with death, marriage, divorce and moving the most stressful situations – my sums would have leapt off the chart.

      In rapid succession I’d struggled under an impossible book deadline, married Mr Wrong, divorced Mr Wrong, bought the wrong flat, accepted the wrong job, suffered the death of a close friend, incurred several large debts, and spent a prolonged period of intense isolation in a foreign country. I couldn’t, in those days, even get a good haircut.

      Shortly after emerging from the eye of this personal squall, I began to experience strange symptoms, at first your workaday ‘female problems’ – everything from ferocious premenstrual tension and irregular periods to cystitis and almost constant vaginal infections.

      As time wore on, my symptoms multiplied: eczema, hives and allergies to a load of food and chemicals; diarrhoea and an irritable bowel; insomnia and night sweats; and severe depression. I had felt powerless for so long that my body seemed to be reacting in parallel, caving in under any sort of microbial onslaught.

      For nearly all of the three years that I was ill, I made the rounds of medical circles – first the standard ones, then the periphery, with nutritionists and homoeopaths, and finally the very outer rim, from breathing specialists to Bioenergeticists. By the autumn of 1986 I was hacking my way though the dense thicket of New Age therapies. I tried breathing from the abdomen. I had the negative emotions Rolfed out of me. Somebody tried to diagnose me by subjecting my hair sample to radio waves. I ploughed through autogenic training, colonic irrigation and even a form of psychotherapy – a mixture of Wilhelm Reich and what felt like being tickled on the face. I learned something about my relationship with my mother. But I did not, at any point, get better.

      By the summer of 1987 a sense of hopelessness descended over me. The worst part of being chronically unwell without a diagnosis legitimatizing it is that a lot of people don’t believe you, or view your symptoms as imaginary