Okay we're gonna start the session now.
I'm a journalist with multiple sclerosis
on a journey into the heart of the wellness industry
to see if there are better ways to manage my condition outside of conventional health care.
This is why I don't like yoga because it just reminds me of all the things that my body can't do.
In this final episode
I'm keen to see if there are any lessons the wellness world might offer to mainstream medicine.
Without wellness you wouldn't be able to deliver science.
And ultimately to what extent my own skepticism has been cured.
Where's your reality?
Don't even ask.
But as an acute cost of living crisis begins to bite,
I first want to understand if access to these therapies can be maintained
while many with autoimmune conditions are focused simply on survival.
I'm at Trafford multiple sclerosis therapy centre and I've come to do some oxygen therapy,
which a lot of people with MS say is really beneficial.
So we're a self-funding centre
members pay donations to our therapies but we subsidise that.
How difficult is it at the moment just to fund and keep it afloat really?
At the moment it's very difficult.
I try not to think about it but –
Sorry.
Yeah, you know it is one of those things it's just really hard.
My consultant wouldn't recommend I came to have oxygen here.
Yet I know it works for me.
That's why centres like ours exist.
We'll be here as long as people want to come.
This is Jasmine,
who has recently begun to access the centre to help manage her own MS.
Do you like crystals?
Yeah I do have a few crystals.
Which ones you got?
Pink quartz which there is a lot there.
But what does it do?
Apparently you're not supposed to touch crystals.
Is it okay if you drop them?
Jasmine is able to use some of the centre's therapies
thanks to the funding subsidies available through its charitable arm.
Would you say that you're now kind of on the wellness wagon
Just looking into the best things for my body
and the best things that are gonna help me with my symptoms.
I think I just live with this fear of getting worse
and I don't want to get worse.
and what do you do?
I take a lot of different vitamins daily, I exercise a lot,
also my diet, I've changed my diet since been diagnosed,
which is a lot, it's very expensive to eat healthier now I've found.
Despite a lack of scientific evidence oxygen therapy therapy is popular among people with MS.
The version available here is wellness without the trimmings
and far more affordable as a result.
If you've got a problem you put your hand up like that,
If we say are you okay and you do that that's great
and if you do that, then we ask you you what's the problem.
Okay I think I've got that.
You'll hear a hissing noise,
as soon as that stops it means you're at the depth you're going to.
Okay we are gonna start the session now.
With purse strings being tightened across the country, many people with autoimmune
conditions are facing difficult decisions around access to wellness therapies.
I'm a single mum with a young child so it is worrying, kind of, bills going up
and I think that – just the uncertainty.
If it does get so bad I'm obviously going to have to give up the lifestyle that I have kind of created
with vitamins and supplements and gym –
And what's the knock-on effect of that?
I can feel the difference, I do feel generally fatigued
I do feel my energy levels, I can feel the pain in my legs,
then in the long term then it's a worry effect
because then how well will I be next year.
Okay we're at pressure now.
This is sort of the accessible side of wellness in some ways,
because it is subsidised and it is donation based,
but the flip side is that they are in constant struggle to even make ends meet right?
Yeah.
So I had counselling sessions through a counsellor here,
which was over the phone so that was run by donations,
whereas if I'd gone to get private counselling that's something I couldn't afford.
What's the answer to all of this though, what would you like to see?
I mean it would be nice to have say doctors and GPs kind of on board that these therapies do help,
so to take it away I'd then think, what's the long-term struggle?
because then is everyone going to come back in a few years
and we're like look at all this damage that's been caused
by not being able to get these complementary therapies.
Okay that's your session complete, I'm going to start bringing you up now.
While centres like these are considered a lifeline by those that use them,
the wellness world more broadly continues to attract its share of critics.
I wanted to know why.
I fully accept that my wellness scepticism is firmly rooted in ignorance,
but I'm on my way to meet Dr Alice Howarth and her skepticism is rooted in science.
Woof.
Alongside her day job researching cellular biology,
Alice is a podcaster and contributor to the Merseyside Skeptics Society
promoting critical thinking and scientific reasoning in a world that sometimes seems to be fast running out of both.
You’re a sceptic with a K.
This isn’t a North American thing? Explain the difference.
It's not cynicism, it's not just being unduly critical,
it's about applying the scientific method to all walks of life,
and trying to be as as open-minded and evidence-based as possible.
How do you see kind of how wellness looks at illness?
When people - and I myself have a chronic health condition - when you're diagnosed
with those conditions quite often you're getting to the point where you're quite desperate
and here's an industry that tells you I can make you well.
Spend this amount of money and you will feel like you did before these symptoms started
or like a normal person.
And there's lots of people in the kind of disability community who would say
what we need to be focusing on is
being successful and contributing to society when you're not well
because that doesn't – you don't lose your value
just because you're not well.
Lots and lots of people go into the wellness industry they try certain therapies
and they genuinely feel like they're getting something from it,
are they kidding themselves?
No our medical system is brilliant and the NHS is great,
but there are problems there and there are certainly issues where people
are dismissed by doctors don't get support from their medical system
and here we have a wellness practitioner who will give you a 90-minute consultation
to talk through and listen to every symptom you have and offer you support
and they can give you absolutes.
A doctor has to say this has X percent chance of helping you.
What do you think is the key difference between
how wellness is targeted at women compared to my own experience of it?
Chronic health problems generally affect women more than men
and there are a lot of gaps in how our medical system supports people with chronic ill health.
the wellness industry has very quickly jumped into that gap
and provided the support that people genuinely need.
Is there anything that you feel conventional medicine could actually learn
from the way the wellness industry operates and the things that it does to provide this holistic care?
Yes we've got this issue that patients particularly patients with chronic ill-health
don't feel heard, don't feel listened to, don't feel like they're taken seriously
and I think this is coming through the more I see junior doctors
the more I feel listened to by those doctors.
More and more often I get the question from my doctor,
‘Well it feels like you know your condition really well, what do you think would help?'
And I think those sorts of questions are really valuable for patients with chronic health conditions.
I hope that it's starting to filter through into the wider medical system.
Now I've enjoyed every wellness treatment I've tried,
not necessarily because of the therapy itself, but because of the environment
the practitioners create.
Providing calm and compassionate care in a relaxing setting.
But is expecting our profoundly squeezed NHS to copy this format asking too much.
For a glimpse of what it might look like I've come to Torbay General Hospital in Devon
to meet neurologist Agne Straukiene.
Oh, here we go. Look. Interview and filming.
Guarding.
Guarding on there.
The Guardian is notorious for typos so ...
It's not just us.
Agna is a standard bearer for a more integrated approach to holistic healthcare.
The thing is that the more we practise healthy living you know the more benefit we get.
So look at these notes they are quite heavy they are thick,
so if people would practise more healthy living and healthy lifestyle
these notes would be much thinner.
There's a view of the NHS approach to health that is sort of drugs
and drugs alone.
It used to be some sort of a you know medicine driven sort of approach
only drugs and only sort of what we can offer in the format of the prescription,
but you know there are some you know prescriptions such as you know going to the gym.
It's changing, gradually changing.
Why is it do you think that the NHS has been a bit slow on the uptake with some of this stuff?
Has there been a failing there?
I don't believe so, I think it's just natural evolution.
If I was a policy maker of course I would you know, introduce the complementary medicine
because even if it is a placebo effect if it works, if it changes people's lives
and people become much healthier, so why not.
Life is not just white or black you know.
this hospital is something of an outlier in its progressive approach to clinical care.
It doesn't look like the NHS here.
Because it's carpeted.
And it's not just the textiles.
Torbay also boasts an array of surprising technology.
From virtual reality headsets to green screen, all aimed at improving the patient experience.
Agne is taking me to meet some of her MS patients
at the healthy lifestyle clinic she set up for peer-to-peer support.
It must be the majority of people with MS who don't know anybody else with MS when they're diagnosed,
so when you get together with groups of other people who are similarly affected with the same diagnosis,
I think it's a great help.
How we doing, you alright?
Are we dancing today?
We are dancing?
If I may.
One. See we do waltz. That's how I assess the function.
And back again.
Thank you.
I never did that with my consultant. I have to say.
For me you have to take ownership of your illness
and it's something that I see an awful lot of people saying, 'oh the NHS didn't work'.
What? What do you mean? What have you tried?
And you get a really, ‘I went to my doctor and he was useless'.
Well what did you say to your doctor?
You didn't help yourself.
What is written on your back?
Let's have a look.
Disabled cyclist.
This is Valerie.
A few years ago her MS symptoms were so bad she could barely walk.
How long did it take you to go from being someone who could do maybe three steps
to kind of the situation we see you in now where you can ride a bike?
Four years.
Four years, but after six months I was back to some kind of normality.
So there's a picture of me at my worst really.
I didn't think I was ever gonna get better.
It’s very surprising –
It's been hard work.
Hard work?
Yeah.
I don't doubt it.
Do you think that you need that kind of that relentless tenacity to kind of
improve your own condition and kind of take charge of things?
It's not about your mindset is going to heal your disease,
it's your mindset is going to help you cope.
I think.
I can't get rid of it, but I want to be on top
and it's an obsession.
When I hear Valerie's story I'm conflicted
and I don't know where the line is between sort of stuff that sounds too good to be true
and stuff that is actually possible
and I don't know that the NHS is very good at explaining where that line is.
Where is that line?
Yes we we have achieved quite brilliant results in her particular case
and that's very successful and we celebrate that.
But that does not apply to everyone,
there are no miracles in this world, people put a lot of effort to achieve good results
by setting the reasonable goals in this life
and MS is a horrible disease
there are some very successful stories and Valerie is one of them.
It does not mean that the MS is curable condition.
I'm not going to suddenly be able to run marathons
because you know walking is a fundamental problem for me.
Is that defeatism, am I just not battling hard enough, what's going on?
I think you haven't got a clear set of goals.
Okay.
Valerie's case was initially start walking and she managed to achieve that,
that built her confidence the psychology and the positivity arose in her,
in her mind, then she set up further goals, you know, to start running.
So every single task that she set up, she she achieved.
You're a doctor,
a consultant in the NHS and yet you speak like a wellness life coach,
is it just time that we put the two together?
You know I spend a lot of time
establishing and developing me as a person, that was my goal to develop the way I approach people now,
that's my main focus and I would like to share that experience
and bring the wellness.
As Colin said to me once, he said, you know, you are an up to date neurologist,
but you are like an old monk.
But that was a compliment.
Yeah it was a compliment.
I feel like I got it a bit wrong.
And I think I was trying to ignore my diagnosis and just carry on living my life
as close to how I was used to living it as possible
and what I was actually doing was burying my head in the sand a little bit.
And I feel like what I've learned is that if you actively address your problems
and target the symptoms that you have you stand a much better chance of of improving things,
but at the same time I still think that wellness is a bit silly.
As luck would have it I've had a referral for a course of physio at my local leisure centre.
So our gym is wheelchair friendly.
Yeah.
I remain unsure about the extent to which I can improve my symptoms through lifestyle changes alone
and unconvinced that specific therapies might provide answers
that evade the limits of our scientific understanding.
Perhaps this lack of true belief in wellness
condemns me to instant failure.
I might as well give it a go.