Last updated 11:24, Thursday, 11 December 2008

ME sufferer Lisa Whitehall at her Barrow home. JON GRANGER REF: 0460890

FOR 20 years Barrow’s Lisa Whitehall has struggled to find a cure for her Myalgic Encephalitis (ME) and has spent over £20,000 in her search for relief from her debilitating condition.
But now, says Lisa, 34, she has found new hope with a type of osteopathy treatment developed by a Manchester-based doctor.
Around 250,000 people in Britain suffer from ME or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, as it is also known.
Yet the condition is notoriously difficult to diagnose and to treat. Lisa, who developed the condition in her teens, says living with the condition has been like a life sentence for her: “People see you and you look normal and act normal but they don’t see the in-between bits.
“It has been a very isolated existence, nobody really knows just what you are putting up with.
“For 20 years now I have lived a half normal life, I’ve been married and had three daughters, but it is also so far from a normal life.
“For around three months of the year I am effectively trapped in the house too weak to do anything.”
She adds: “It’s been a hell of a long journey.”
Lisa was diagnosed with the condition when she was just 14, she explains: “When I was 13 I had glandular fever and I never really got over it. Things just went downhill from there. For the next 18 months I kept picking up viral infections and I constantly felt ill.
“I was drained, weak, aching all over and had a lot of nausea and back pain, as well as very sore knees and joints generally.”
From being a very active young girl who spent her weekends riding horses and her lunchtimes playing netball and squash, Lisa found herself unable to do the simplest tasks.
She says: “I tried going back to school but I couldn’t think straight and couldn’t function – I would try and read a book but nothing was going in.”
Too ill to continue at school or even to bathe herself, for five months Lisa had a home tutor and managed to take one GCSE.
A series of bloodtests revealed nothing, yet Lisa’s symptoms persisted and she was losing a lot of weight and so her concerned parents finally took her to see a doctor privately to try and find out once and for all what was ailing their daughter.
“It was at that point that the ME was diagnosed,” recalls Lisa, adding, “I eventually got back to a kind of normality and at 18 for a few months I even managed to hold down a job in a shop. But then I relapsed and had to give it up.”
Despite the severity of Lisa’s condition, she says that little help is on offer from the NHS and over the years she has been forced to seek out her own treatments.
She says: “You name it, I’ve tried it, including colonic irrigation, acupuncture, herbal supplements, food intolerance tests – everything.
“But in all that time the only thing that has really helped me is osteopathy.
“When I was 18 I first saw an osteopath and he said a lot of my problems were structural.
“Since then I have spent about £20,000 on osteopaths trying to combat the joint pain and lack of energy. It keeps me going. I can’t live without it.”
She is understandably upset that so much of her own money goes on her treatment. She says: “The NHS aren’t interested and won’t pay for an osteopath. So I pay around £240 a month seeing an osteopath out of my own money. It’s financially crippling but I have no choice.”
It was during a visit to one of her osteopaths in Furness that Lisa finally found out about a treatment that she hopes will finally cure her of ME.
She explains: “He told me about Dr Raymond Perrin a few months ago. I read his book and then made an appointment to go and see him.
“He told me that for all this time I have been living on around 40 per cent of the energy most people live on.
“It’s funny because I’ve said for years that I never feel more than 50 per cent well!”
Perrin, the author of The Perrin Technique, believes that ME is a physical disorder that leads to a build up of toxins within the brain and the spine.
He’s developed the Perrin Technique to diagnose ME by identifying definite physical ‘signs’ and to treat the disorder by improving drainage of these poisons from the central nervous system through osteopathy.
The specialist said that Lisa had a number of the physical signs he believes to be at the root of the condition.
She explains: “He feels it is more than just glandular fever or a viral infection that causes ME. “In order to be diagnosed he says you have to have a number of symptoms, which include a viral infection but also a shoulder or head injury and a stressful childhood.
“I had them all – I’d broken my collar bone horse riding and also had concussion. I also have curvature of the spine and he felt I’d had a more than normally stressful childhood because I went to a private school and was pushed very hard – often doing two to three hours homework a night and playing sports at lunchtime.”
Dr Perrin claims that a combination of all these factors can result in a breakdown of the lymph system and toxins effectively poisoning your brain.
His technique can help to drain these toxins away and stimulate the healthy flow of the lymphatic system. Lisa now sees a practioner of Perrin’s technique at Lytham St Annes (the nearest trained practitioner) every week, which costs her around £240 each month for the treatment and petrol costs.
She says that Dr Perrin claims that with his technique Lisa could be cured within 18 to 24 months.
She says it is the first glimmer of hope she has been offered for two decades: “When I heard that I cried.
“It was such a relief and nobody else in 20 years has ever committed to saying they think they can cure me of this.
“Doctors have just said the same thing over and over again – take some rest, we don’t know what’s causing this.
“In other ways I lead a perfectly normal life but people don’t see what you can’t do.
“Some days I don’t even have the energy to get out of bed and have a shower. You just learn to live with it and make the best of it. But for someone to sit and finally explain my symptoms and why its happening is such a relief.
“I am hoping this will change my life.”