Essential Oils (& bit if a rant)

Depending on what is actually wrong with you, a shiatsu massage from a practitioner may work, or lymphatic drainage, or just plain old in a beauty salon massage.

You can get proper essential oils from health food shops or somewhere like Neal's Yard Remedies - google them. Lavender is very good for helping sleep, and camomile is calming, tangerine is warm and cheerful and rose combined with geranium is great for being almost sedative in its properties - it's used for women in labour, as it is supposed to calm, ease plain and reduce anxiety. They are quite pricey, but you just add about 3-5 drops into an eggcup of carrier oil - I would suggest that you get sweet almond oil from the chemist, or grapeseed oil from the supermarket.


But don't believe that anyone gets preferential treatment. Some get treatment due to medical priority - and sometimes it is more effective to set up specialist services - had the poster with a husband suffering from mental health issues attended a normal psychiatric clinic, only to be sharing the waiting room with the addictions clinic, there would have been upset that they mixed the two together, even though many addicts have been found to be self medicating for the exact same conditions. Moreover, someone with a mental illness may be able to live for many years with limited treatment, but someone with the identical illness but a dual diagnosis of dependence due to being diagnosed too late could easily die without intensive input for a brief period of time (the funding usually disappears after 8-12 weeks and then they are back where they started).


Moreover, there is a danger in making distinctions between who is deserving and who has brought ill health upon themselves - as the latter category can include cancer patients who have smoked, heart disease patients who haven't exercised, osteoporosis sufferers who didn't eat enough dairy products - or people with chronic pain who consistently ignored advice to bend with their knees and not their backs and taken painkillers without taking steps to adjust their bad habits at any point.


Group therapy may help, as you get the chance to say how bad you feel about things, share your feelings about whether it can ever go away, talk about how angry you are, for example.


A course I went on included a little aspect of talking, and I was surprised at the number of people there who were convinced their lives were basically over because they had an acute back injury, or were fed up with their recovery not being completed within 12 weeks of surgery. Being in a group made it easier to say that some people don't get better, at best, they get remission. Hopefully, someone benefitted from the different perspective.

In the same part of the course, they discussed the physiology of pain, posture, suitable exercise, etc, all of which are important when dealing with chronic conditions.

I'm quite up on the exercises and posture stuff, having had [starts counting on fingers and toes] 25 years since my first major injury as a result of a lifelong condition or two, but I had never said out loud before that I am never going to be cured. But I don't feel my life is over, it's different to other people's, but not over.

So I still benefitted from one of those different courses.



(Even though the MIL got free acupuncture at a private clinic within a week of referral through the NHS when she slipped a disc last month and I still haven't been offered it even when the physiotherapist is qualified in it, in all the frequent flyer miles I've clocked up in my area at physio, despite asking )

not going to comment on types of treatments on NHS, or who's 'more deserving' and who isn't but regarding oils, I always get mine from a site called http://www.pagandreams.co.uk/

It is mostly a site that sells pagan/Wiccan stuff but they do a huge range of essential oils, top quality and they always arrive super quick. I've ordered oils one afternoon and had them arrive the next morning. Plus, for each oil they have a little bit of text explaining what it is used for etc, which is useful.