People who chose alternative medicine

Stephanie Davis trained as a nurse and midwife and spent some time working here before moving to the northern Thai border to work in a camp for refugees fleeing the conflict in Laos. Facilities were minimal and the conditions in which she worked were often challenging and dangerous. Nevertheless, she loved the immediacy of this crisis nursing, where her practical coping skills as well as her medical knowledge were constantly tested. Between the late 1970s and mid-1980s, she worked almost constantly overseas with agencies such as the United Nations and Concern. On one posting her job was to improve the skills of local midwives whose only equipment was a blade. "It might sound primitive, but they taught me as much as I taught them," she says. "They were tremendously caring women who looked after their patients better than I've seen many patients looked after in the developed world, with all its hi-tech equipment." It was experiences such as this, and single-handedly running a huge combined TB and general hospital on a mountain top, that changed Davis's view of how medical care should be. "I had been trained using all the techniques of modern medicine, but they count for very little when your hospital is a tent and you have few drugs and no equipment. It throws you back on basic skills of diagnosis - using your medical knowledge in combination with intuition, common sense and what your patient is telling you. You just have to cope." Coping was not something all the health professionals Davis encountered did very well. She tells of a French consultant obstetrician who was horrified because a woman was having her baby on the ground and the obstetrician was totally unable to assist her without the back-up of Western birthing paraphernalia. She also encountered highly qualified doctors who couldn't make a diagnosis without laboratory support and others who took photographs of seriously ill people for their scrapbooks, but did nothing practical to help them. "I'm not saying they were all like that," Davis insists. "Many were excellent. But what it really emphasised was how much Western medicine has lost in terms of its ability to provide basic care and how it has become hi-tech and drug dependent to the detriment of its patients."

Having her own baby in Ireland convinced Davis that she didn't want to remain in mainstream nursing. "I have been at births in what we would consider primitive conditions which were happy, dignified events. That was not my experience at home. During labour I kept wishing I was in a mud hut in Sudan where people would have cared about me.

Again, I'm not saying all midwives don't care, but there has been a change in attitude and what the computer and the monitor say have become more important than the patient." Shortly after the birth of her son, Stephanie Davis began to consider the possibility of remaining in healthcare, but in a way that was more sympathetic to her mindset. She looked at a number of options, including homeopathy and osteopathy, before opting to study Chinese medicine. She qualified in 1995 and now practices at Dublin's Walmer Holistic Centre. "I am very happy because I can treat the whole person - emotionally, spiritually and physically," she says. "In China, they combine both the traditional and modern systems which is ideal. Unfortunately, Western medicine predominantly goes down a single track."

FOR MOST of her adult life, Erica Jewitt worked with horses. She trained and rode showjumping and event horses on the international equestrian circuit and also worked as an agent, spotting talented young horses for clients in Ireland and overseas. Visits from the equine chiropractor were routine and it was while watching chiropractor Richard Arthur at work that an idea for a career change began to develop in her mind. "I had been riding horses since I was a child and it was a natural progression to work with them when I grew up," she says. "But it's a tough life and involves a great deal of hard physical work. Richard Arthur used to come over to Ireland from Britain to treat my horses and I knew how effective his treatments were in sorting out their problems and I began to think it was something I'd quite like to do. I checked out the training situation and found that it involved six years studying at the McTimoney College in Oxford. This comprised four years' training to treat humans and two years on top to become a horse chiropractor." Jewitt's first year was spent entirely in the classroom. In year two, she observed qualified practitioners at work. In third year, she was allowed to undertake simple treatments under supervision. It was during her third year that she changed her mind about treating horses. "I found I really enjoyed working on people and that it was very fulfilling to see the positive results of the treatments," she says. "I think a lot of people are put off by the word chiropractor because they associate it with other chiropractic techniques which are quite physical. McTimoney is very gentle. We use our hands to make small movements using very little force, but it's very effective. McTimoney was an engineer who had personal experience of being treated by traditional chiropractors and he believed that it should be possible to achieve the same result with a less invasive technique, so he developed his own system." Jewitt is one of a handful of McTimoney practitioners in Ireland. All her referrals are by word of mouth and she says that about half those who come to her have already tried a plethora of other treatments. "With back problems in particular, there is a view that if you can't scan it, X-Ray it or test it in some way, the problem doesn't exist," she says. "But McTimoney is very touch-led, and practitioners take time to feel what's going on in the body - invariably there is something that's not quite right which the technique may be able to correct," she says.