One of the most invidious sources of messages about our worth is received daily from the media.

We learn that we should be a certain size, a certain shape, our skin and hair should be just so and there is an optimum age too.

Any discrepancy from these ideals is a failing on our part. We should be in control. Our weight, appearance and general fitness is in our own hands.
The medical profession also have a large responsibility for our lack of self-esteem. According to some of them, any departure from an ideal diet, exercise regime and general way of life brings health penalties that are entirely our own fault.

Arthritis? Are you overweight? Have you been exposed to cold, damp or other physical hardship? You made your own choices.

Cancer? Do you smoke, eat nitrates in tinned or preserved foods, inhale polluted air? What do you expect?

Multiple Sclerosis? Did you live in a temperate zone until age fourteen? Were you born into a family with a suspect genetic heritage? Have you been exposed to stress or trauma? There's nothing we can do. You are simply defective.

Heart disease? Don't you avoid all salt, keep your weight at starvation level, exercise like an athlete and avoid all forms of emotional stress and strain? You don't? Well, tough!

Mental illness? You chose the wrong parents; the wrong partners; the wrong lifestyle. You are a mess.
You can live with it or do the other thing.

There is a dangerous attitude emerging even among alternative practitioners, that of blaming the victim for failure to overcome the problem.

The dedicated medical establishment specialist intimates that unless you follow instructions to the last comma, placing unfailing trust in radical surgical, chemical and radioactive intervention, he is quite justified in washing his hands of you as a wilful and unco-operative nuisance who deserves to suffer.

Some alternative practitioners also imply that unless you are prepared to spend a small fortune on unproven products, you are not serious about your wish to live. Given sufficient determination, positive thinking, alternative diets, adherence to one punishing regime or another, you can opt to be problem free. If you are not, it is because you have chosen to be ill. It is your own fault.

Perhaps you are not as ill as those who have been promoted to the ranks of tested and accredited sufferers from one specified disease or another.

Poor you. You are probably in pain, exhausted, suffering one unexplained symptom after another, doing the rounds of diagnostic clinics where nothing outstandingly specific can be identified and finally consigned to the scrap heap as a neurotic, a hysteric or even a malingerer. Have some tranquilisers.

Instead of listening to patients and working towards identification and treatment of pre-disablement syndromes, there seems to be a conspiracy to deny the problem until damage is visibly entrenched and chemical companies can perform their function of making a profit for shareholders from palliation of an established condition.

Many health care professionals, unable to solve problems which refuse to match their textbooks, and wary of spending money except for measurable return, treat the patient as enemy: someone who will manipulate them, waste their time and money and still hang on to symptoms which, according to current doctrine, are the result of a psychopathic imagination or at least emotional and intellectual inadequacy.

Do you recognise any of this? Have you felt angry and humiliated by such sweeping judgement? Does a stubborn inner voice insist that it is your body and you know when it is not functioning as it should?

Well, good for you!

There are enlightened practitioners to be found: men and women who will accept you as a fellow human being, doing your best in difficult circumstances. They will listen to you, spend time with you, accept your version of reality and work with you to optimise your life-choices.

You simply have to decide that you are worth the effort of searching them out. You do not have to settle for a barely civil dismissal. You are the customer. What other tradesman could get away with such shoddy treatment? Where else would you tolerate such rudeness?

Indeed, if you are treated like this, it is your own fault. You deserve better and you can get it if you stick to your guns. Respect yourself and you demand respect from others.

It is not easy to preserve ego integrity in the face of such breathtaking arrogance as infects a large part of the medical establishment. But there are techniques which diminish the fearsomeness of experts and restore them to a level where you can see them clearly as frustrated individuals who follow the rules but are opposed at every turn by increasing droves of patients who present insoluble problems, who refuse either to be healed or to admit there is no disease, who strike at the very roots of a professional healer's self-worth.

One of my clients, faced by a loudly rude and dismissive specialist, imagined him in his underclothes as a suppplicant for her sexual favours. She was amazed that this allowed her to feel friendly towards an amusing and vulnerable human being whose pomposity was a defence gainst his fear of exposure.

Taking time out to re-imagine a situation relieves pressure, avoids knee-jerk reactions with possibly irreparable results and defuses potentially explosive accumulations of frustration and resentment.

It need not take long. Imagining a person as some kind of animal is one way of learning far more about them and ourselves than we might if we were misled only by surface appearances.

One of my friends described me as a hamster. I was quite warmed by the realisation that she felt warmly towards me as an attractive, cuddly, safe, amusing but non-intrusive companion. But when we discussed the picture further she had taken into account the fact that much of my productive time is spent in pursuits which others do not see; I make provision for all kinds of emergencies, preparing in advance and storing up negotiable assets in the form of goods, work and knowledge; and I can be reclusive, determinedly protective of my privacy, quite able to administer a sharp, reproving nip if liberties are taken.

I saw her as a bullfinch, cheerful and colourful, active and ever-welcome, but easily startled into retreat and inclined to cause unthinking damage in pursuit of her own ends.

So one neurologist is a sleek tomcat, aware of his attractiveness, purring at recognition of his abilities,
but distant and aloof except on his own terms. Another is a heron, thin and immobile, coldly patient in assessment before striking and spearing some anomalous factor and flying away to devour it in solitary satisfaction. Both are isolated by their function. Both are under pressure to survive in their environment by use of the particular adaptations they have evolved.

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