'Often, it's the human spirit that's ignored by conventional medicine'

"I had no social life. There were friends we didn't see for many years because of my condition. The depression itself was managed with

medication and psychotherapy, but they did nothing to help the reclusiveness."

A couple of years ago, John heard about the Positive Care Programme (PCP) – a Leeds-based charity providing a 24-week course of

complementary therapies and motivational workshops for people with long-term health problems and people working as unpaid carers to those with chronic conditions.

"I was getting close to retirement, and had three aims: learning, creativity and helping. In order to help people I had to overcome the reclusiveness somehow, and was determined to find a way."

John got a place on the weekly half-day programme, then run in Chapeltown. The morning consisted of participants taking

three "classes" – one group activity such as meditation or a motivational workshop, a one-on-one therapy like spiritual healing or massage, and an exercise activity such as yoga or tai'chi. Creative activities like art and singing were also on offer.

John found that his feelings of panic abated when he was among other people in a learning situation. "I still don't like parties, but I could cope easily if we were all concentrating on an activity. The energy about the sessions was very positive, too, and I quickly began to look forward to them.

"A spiritual healer I had sessions with told me that she thought I would make a healer because I had an unusual kind of energy about me. Although the PCP can't cure depression, it did change my life and gave me the confidence to explore healing. Afterwards I trained for a year and became a qualified healer. My wife and I are about to entertain two sets of friends we haven't been able to see in many years because of my reclusiveness, and I have finished writing my autobiography.

"I had a marvellous experience in India recently, when one of the women who was looking after us complained of a severe migraine. I sat her chair under the shade of a tree and gave her healing, taking the pain away. It was wonderful to be able to help her." Su Mason, director of the Positive Care Programme, says no-one was more sceptical than she was about the notion of alternative therapies before she became a healer herself 12 years ago. Her background was solidly rooted in conventional medicine – certainty based on drug trial data and experience.

After many years in nursing, becoming a senior sister in a children's burns unit, she had completed a PhD and went on to become joint head of the Clinical Trials Research Unit at Leeds University. Su was in the business of evaluating the effectiveness of new drugs in the fields of cancer and conditions relating to illness in newborn babies, potential mainstream treatments costing the NHS millions of pounds. Complementary therapies hadn't really crossed her radar.

"An elderly uncle, a modest sort of man, told me he was training as a healer. It sounded weird, but it intrigued me," says Su. "I thought it was rubbish, but at the same time wanted to know more. I got in touch with a spiritual healing trainer and experienced it for myself." She describes how, early on in this process, she was once in bed with flu, and suffered an asthma attack in the night. "I needed to get up and find my inhaler, but it was cold. Instead I concentrated hard on asking for healing. I felt a great heat around my middle, a tingling in my fingers, and saw a blue light in my mind's eye. I was quite frightened, but before long the wheezing stopped, and the next thing I knew I woke up in the morning."

Two weeks later, Su began training as a healer. She says anyone with a positive mental attitude can become a healer – "generally, good people make good healers." She describes herself as "not religious, but spiritual" and refers to the energy she harnesses to help others as "the source". Healers who are religious believe that the source is God, she says. Although they call themselves healers, therapists don't claim they can actually heal anyone. And, while some people are sensitive to healing energy, not everyone feels an improvement.

She continued the day job but became increasingly involved with healing through Leeds Healing Centre, which helped people with a range of long-term illnesses. "The NHS is great for acute situations and caring for the terminally-ill, but those with chronic long-term conditions, whether arthritis, headaches or depression, are just given tablets and sent away."

Su came round to thinking that what such people – and those who care for the chronically-ill – needed was an holistic programme of treatments offering pick-me-ups like massage, therapies such as acupuncture, and spiritual healing, but also motivational help to improve attitudes and learn about healthy living and exercise to create energy and invigorate. "You need to focus on the person, not the illness," she says.

This idea took shape with the help of like-minded friends around her kitchen table six years ago. Two were therapists, two medical researchers, one a carer for her disabled daughter, and another woman was undergoing cancer treatment.

Local therapists were contacted, a meeting held, Lottery funding for a pilot study found via the mental health charity Touchstone, and in autumn 2004, 37 people started the first 24-week PCP. Su resigned her research job, and six years on, there are 23 therapists on the team with the programme running for half the year at the Burley Lodge Centre close to Leeds city centre.

The philosophy is that of helping participants to help

themselves. "Human beings are body, mind and spirit, and often it's the spirit that gets ignored by conventional medicine," says Su, who attributes much of her own calm and sunny demeanour to daily

meditation. Those who attend the programme do so on a first-come first served basis. Some are referred by health professionals, although the NHS does not pay towards the free service.

Having continued to run by paying therapists and hiring premises with the help of small grants, the PCP has this week received a Lottery grant of 213,000 to fund five programmes in some of Leeds's most socially deprived areas (Hyde Park and Woodhouse, Chapel Allerton, Gipton and Harehills, Beeston and Holbeck and Killingbeck and Seacroft) over the next three years.

Mason and colleagues are overjoyed that an even wider array of people will experience what PCP has to offer, although they live in places where complementary services are not usually on offer, even individually. She believes there is no other such programme in the country.

The Lottery funding application was based on an evaluation of the PCP whose results might give even the most hardened sceptic pause for thought. Of 205 participants (91 per cent of them people with long-term illnesses including depression) attending the programme from 2006 to 2009, long-term "significant benefits" according to approved academic assessment yardsticks, include:

n 38 per cent reporting that they visited their GP less often

n 32 per cent reducing medication

n 92 per cent thinking their mental well-being had improved.

"I think this idea should be offered all over the country, it's so great," says former participant Rajni Sharma. She had to give up working at a bank after 23 years because of a range of chronic health problems that started with anaemia and progressed over 10 years to fibromyalgia, under-active thyroid, depression, and the lung condition sarcoidosis.

A battery of drugs were given to help manage pain, tiredness and mood, but she believes it was

the PCP that made her feel better in herself.

"I still had the illnesses, but after every session I came away happier and rejuvenated. I benefited from the therapies and exercises but also from being with kind, spiritually-inclined people who all helped each other. No-one judges you the way you can be judged when you have no visible illness."

Su Mason's dream is that the Department of Health will acknowledge the power of the PCP and give NHS funding for it to run nationwide. On the basis of results so far, the potential savings on the drugs bill is just one possible carrot. She has now applied for funding for a study of the PCP's cost-effectiveness.

n www.positivecareprogramme.com