It is hard to know sometimes what therapy to choose or who to see or to get referred to, the opinion of someone whose judgement you trust is not always there when you need it. Whether you are looking for a GP, a massage therapist, a dentist or a chiropractor it is important to find someone who you are comfortable with, treats you professionally and helps you fix whatever it is that brought you to them.

Asking the right questions helps and the answers you are given should be convincing and understandable, it is neither good to feel patronised by a childish explanation nor made feel stupid or confused by having jargon thrown at you. This goes for advice too, usually there are things that people can do to help themselves during the course of treatment and things that they should avoid doing. If you are given information to read about your health condition it is a good idea to read it, this includes the product information slips in medication packaging.

You may want to use more than one therapy to improve your health, some therapies work well together, osteopathy and massage when used strategically together can produce very satisfying results. On the other hand pharmaceutical medication may not mix atall well with herbal medicine, even though one is synthetic and the other natural they still may produce an adverse reaction if ingested together. Taking a high dose of pharmaceutical blood thinners for example might be too much if you are taking herbal blood thinners at the same time, your pharmacist should be able to advise you particularly if his chemist sells herbal medicine as many do now.

When you get advice about how long your health concern may take to get remedied you cannot expect optimum results if you don’t follow the course of treatment, long term problems usually need more time to fix than acute conditions. This goes just as much for getting the necessary number of massages as it does for finishing a course of antibiotics even though you think you are “good enough” now.

A good practitioner recognises their limitations and will refer you onto a different therapist sometimes to get further improvement, a chiropractor for instance who is treating your lower back pain might want you to see a naturopath or nutritionist to help you reduce your bodyweight because it may be a big part of the problem, remain open about trying new things.

“Alternate” medicine does not need to be at odds with “Mainstream” medicine, they  tend to be good at different things. You might get neck pain that really nags away at you, the x-rays show it is not bad enough for surgery,  anti inflammatories may not help you either so getting some alternate medicine may be what you need. If you break your leg, get cancer, have a heart attack, feel suicidal or get hepatitis a medical practitioner is the person you want to see.

We still have a long way to go but gradually different health practitioners are learning and respecting more of  what each other does.