Life in a Wheelchair Didn't Seem so Bad...

Some £20,000 worth of conventional medicine didn't cure 76-year-old Philip Knightley's back pain. Alternative therapies did, though.

Senior British scientists and medics have demanded that health chiefs stop "wasting" money on alternative treatments.

Prince Charles has hit back by calling on doctors to "abandon their conventional mindset and learn from complementary medicine". I suffered a year of misery and faced a future in a wheelchair before I realised that, for lower back pain at least, Prince Charles is absolutely right.

I had played tennis four times a week ever since I was a child. I thought I was fit. Then, just before my 76th birthday, while putting on my trousers one morning, my back went "click" and I could hardly move. The only position that was pain free was lying down in bed.

My daughter had spent six months lying on the settee in our living room battling back pain a few years before. Like 80 per cent of Western adults, my father had back pain off and on all his life. Had I passed on his genes to her?

I was determined to have a quick fix, so I by-passed my overworked GP and the NHS and went to a Harley Street specialist. He sent me off for a round of tests and body imaging. I had five X-rays, four MRIs, a CT scan, a bone scan, an ultra-sound examination, and the full range of blood tests. It all took weeks. Back in the specialist's rooms he said he was delighted to tell me that although there were signs of degenerative osteoarthritis, I was in excellent health. "If that's so, doctor," I said, "then why do I have this terrible pain in my bum?"
"I'm damned if I know, old boy," he said. "I'm damned if I know."

A surgeon suggested surgery (that's what surgeons do). "It's a 40-minute operation on the spine to relieve pressure on the nerve," he said. "We'll have you back on the court in two months."

So I checked into the London Clinic where the first thing they did was to relieve me of £13,000 towards the cost of an expected stay of seven days. If I checked out earlier, I'd get a refund. The actual operation would, of course, be extra. The consultant surgeon and his team came to get me from my luxury bedroom a few hours later. He had one last look at all the images and then announced that he did not think surgery was justified after all. "Let's try painkillers, physiotherapy and aqua-therapy," he said.

A neighbour suggested injections of pain-relieving steroids into the spine. I found someone who did this procedure at the Wellington Hospital. I had four facet joint injections and two epidurals of steroids. All they did was to stimulate my incipient cataracts (a known side effect) and I've since had to have cataracts removed from both eyes.

Two months down the road towards a wheelchair I realised I had paid out £20,000 for conventional treatment and had got nowhere. I was spending my days and nights lying on a thin mattress on a coffee table in my living room. I read American thrillers - anything else required too much concentration -watched daytime television, slept a lot and waited for the day I would wake up and the pain would be gone. Instead it got worse. A sneeze brought on a spasm of pain so intense it can only be described as exquisite.

Another two months and I had become institutionalised in my own home. The four-hourly routine of taking my painkillers and other medication regulated my day. My morale had slumped - more medication for that -and my confidence and independence had eroded. Simple tasks were beyond me. I became incapable of taking decisions and increasingly left them to my medical advisers and hard-pressed family. I was weak and emaciated. My muscles were melting away and it seemed clear I would never play tennis again. And, even worse, a lifetime in bed or in a wheelchair no longer seemed so terrible.

Then two remarkable young men entered my life. The first was a London-based osteopath called Kristian Wood. He used to be a premier league footballer but was badly injured and had to retire. A woman friend who believes in the power of positive thinking helped to heal him and then convinced him to spend his compensation money doing a five-year course in osteopathy.

Kristian came to see me on my coffee table. We agreed that conventional medicine, partly for its own convenience, had disempowered me. I had never been told enough about my condition. I had never been offered all the alternatives. Above all, no one had investigated what I had done wrong in the first place to get to where I was now.

Kristian said his approach was to encourage his patients to regain the power over their recovery that conventional medicine tended to take away from them, to put them back in control of their lives.

It took some time for this to sink in. He told me what to do. I was to stop taking painkillers. I was to get off my back and move around as much as I possibly could. He would manipulate my back to get rid of the stiffness and lack of mobility. And in between his thrice-weekly visits I was to get on with a series of exercises he would devise for me.

When he realised that, after a couple of weeks, I had not stopped the painkillers and was lax about the exercise regime - largely because of the pain involved - he suggested I should engage a personal trainer, someone to come to the house who would make me do the exercises.

Enter Chris Baker, a young trainer at a gym near my house in Notting Hill Gate. Chris had a degree in sports and exercise science. He, too, believes that a client has to take charge of his own rehabilitation and that his job is to help provide the motivation to do so. He aims to strengthen through exercise the body's core muscles - the pelvic floor, the abdominals and others - so that injuries, pain and weaknesses can be shrugged off.

"You're never too old and never too weak to exercise," he says. He told me that since I had been in bed for so long, getting me walking again would be a slow process. We devised ways of measuring how I was getting on and even set a date for my first game of tennis, some nine months ahead. Chris is incredibly fit but his major asset is his enthusiasm and his ability to encourage you: "Come on, you can do it. You can do it." And to win his praise you try and often succeed.

We began on the coffee table with little exercises aimed at reminding my brain that there were core muscles that had not been told to do anything for so long that they had forgotten how. At first it was desperately difficult. I bought a wheeled walker. Chris would carry it to the front gate, I would stagger out and we would see how far I could make it along the street. "An extra house each day," he said. "That way you can measure your progress." He also suggested some swimming.

The breakthrough came when Kristian said it would be good for me to go on holiday to Ibiza with my daughter, even if we had to drive to the airport with me lying on the back seat of her car, and even if I had to get around in Ibiza on my walker.

To my own surprise, I made it. At the villa, I floated in the pool for hours with a big rubber ring under my arms, stretching my spine. And one day, after a late Spanish lunch, I suddenly realised that I had not taken my noonday dose of painkillers and I didn't miss them. That was a year ago and I haven't taken a single painkiller since.

When I could get around the block on the walker, I gave it away and used a walking stick instead. After a couple of weeks, I threw the walking stick in the rubbish bin. By then I was deep into the workout world of bodyweight exercises, rubber bands and Swiss balls, ab crunches, lunges, squats, push-ups, the bridge, the plank, the cobra and reverse wood chops. I was also jogging around the block. My wife had banished the coffee table bed and I was leading a reasonably normal life. Some days were better than others but the trend was steadily upwards.

I flew to Australia and India last month, knees-in-the-chin class, and walked off the plane, after two 14-hour flights, laughing. Last week, right on schedule, I played my first game of tennis in a year. I will never allow myself to have back trouble again because I know how to keep it at bay. It may still be called alternative medicine, and the conventional medical establishment may dismiss it as "a waste of time". But I agree with Prince Charles, it is not. And, as I can testify, it works.
The Daily Telegraph, 29th May 2006