A Very Painful Chapter

The Times 14 October 2006

The novelist Michael Arditti turned to cranial osteopathy for back ache. It nearly killed him.

In my late twenties, I gave up dairy products. I also gave up meat, wheat, alcohol, tea, coffee, processed food and as many E-numbers as I could without becoming a hermit, but it’s the dairy products that are pertinent here.

I had suffered from depressive illness for years and failed to respond to a plethora of drugs. An open-minded doctor encouraged me to visit a dietary therapist, who turned out to be inspirational. Refreshingly free of any ‘Your body is a temple’ cant, she explained how the toxins in food generated toxins in the brain, an insight which, though lost to the Tesco generation, stretched back to Hippocrates, who’d declared: ‘Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food.’

So it proved for me. The change of diet combined with psychotherapy set me well on the road to recovery and I happily threw away my pills. Over the next decade, I worked as a theatre critic and wrote three novels, bolstered by a weekly regime of yoga, aromatherapy and reflexology.

I stuck religiously to my diet, issuing indulgent friends and hostesses with lengthy lists of requirements, explaining that, when it came to the cheeseboard, dairy referred exclusively to cow’s products. At home I enjoyed regular goat’s and sheep’s cheeses brought by a friend from France. Although the use of unpasteurized milk made them more flavoursome than their English counterparts, it also made them potentially lethal. Indeed, one contained a bug, which changed – and almost destroyed – my life.

My earliest intimation that something was wrong came with a series of stabbing pains at the base of my spine. At first I attributed them to posture and the hours spent hunched over a computer but, after a couple of days, the pains grew so intense that I could barely move, let alone leave the house. I rang and spoke to my doctor for the first time in a decade. She said simply: ‘You’re very tall, Michael. Tall people get sciatica. You’ve got sciatica,’ before prescribing a week in bed.

Meanwhile, a friend urged me to call a husband and wife team of cranial osteopaths who had helped a Royal Ballet dancer with a crippling spine injury return to the stage. Their willingness to visit me contrasted with my doctor’s telephone diagnosis and confirmed my faith in holistic medicine. They appeared to be affable, down-to-earth and, above all, effective. On the first visit, as on all later ones, it was the man who took the lead, applying gentle pressure to various points of my body and rebalancing my energies. His wife, who was heavily pregnant, lent advice and the occasional hand. At the end of the initial treatment, the pain had dwindled and I felt full of hope.

By the following morning the pain had returned as acutely as ever. I phoned the osteopaths who explained that a course of treatment might be necessary, which proved to be the case. Since a single treatment cost £120, my pocket was also suffering and I inquired whether it might be possible to claim on my health insurance. To my surprise, I found that it was. That the usually intransigent insurers, who had refused my claims for every other holistic therapy, allowed cranial osteopathy gave it the ultimate seal of approval.

The osteopaths came almost daily for the next five weeks, during which my improvements remained stubbornly short-lived. In retrospect, it seems extraordinary that I should not have rebelled but, at the time, I was extremely vulnerable, suffering agonising pain and willing to trust anyone who could offer even temporary relief.

What I now find hardest to forgive is that their outlook, while in theory the antithesis of the belief that illness is a divine punishment, in practice amounted to much the same. They claimed that the pain was the product of all the negative energy I had stored at the base of my spine during my years of depression and, when I was forced to cancel a holiday to which I’d been much looking forward, they accused me of being scared to take risks and finding an excuse not to go. In my enfeebled state, I believed them and, despite running a high fever, made preparations to travel. Had I done so, I would surely have died.

Against all the evidence, they claimed to have healed me, pronouncing me free of ‘dis-ease’ and asserting that the pain, sweats and fevers were simply the negative energy working its way through my body. In despair, I called a doctor who rushed me to hospital, where I was diagnosed with discitis, an infection of the spine between the vertebral discs. As the condition had gone untreated for so long, I had developed septicemia. For several days, my life hung in the balance, but I was saved by both the skill of the doctors and, in a strange twist, my own medical regime, since, having taken no antibiotics during the previous decade, I was particularly responsive to the massive doses I was given.

I remained in hospital for fourteen weeks, during most of which I lay paralysed. I’ve been left permanently disabled since the bug destroyed two discs at the base of the spine causing the vertebrae to fuse, in the equivocal words of my consultant, ‘worse than we hoped but better than we feared.’ I was sent hobbling into middle age since nothing destroys the illusion of youth more decisively than the need for a stick.

On my admission to hospital, the friend who’d recommended the osteopaths rang to inform them of the gravity of my condition. To her fury, they continued to insist that they had cured me and that the discitis must be a secondary illness. Their sole concern was with their bill, threatening me with legal action should the insurers fail to settle it.

Their callousness, threats and utter lack of humility led me to consider bringing a case against them, but I was deterred by a solicitor who pointed out the difficulty of proving medical negligence. I would have had to demonstrate not only that their actions had materially exacerbated my condition but that other osteopaths would have acted differently. It had, after all, been my decision to use them rather than doctors. While I was in no doubt that the osteopaths had knowingly exploited me after finding I was covered by insurance, I was warned that, like other professionals, their colleagues would close ranks.

Although, in the ensuing five years, I have rebuilt my life and continued to write, I remain very bitter about the abuse of my trust. I still benefit greatly from holistic therapies such as Reiki and reflexology, but the irony is that today, as in the depth of my depression, my primary support comes from pills.

A Sea Change by Michael Arditti is published by Maia at £8.99.