An ill for every pill

I've always been wary of alternative medicine. I mistrust people who set themselves up as allergy testers from examining single hairs and I've pooh-poohed homeopathy, acupuncture, cranial osteopathy and crystal therapy. I've put my faith in orthodox Western therapies, believing more in antibiotics and laboratory results than in chakras, meridian points and hot and cold humours.

I did try Chinese herbs once, for a flare-up of ulcerative colitis - an unpleasant disorder that afflicts me from time to time - but only because Western doctors said the herbs could help in the treatment of eczema (ulcerative colitis is a kind of eczema). And before taking it, I made sure I had a (Western) liver-function test first; (Western) research had found that liver damage could be a side-effect of taking strange dried plants. The remedy didn't work. After that, I stuck firmly to my old faith.

Three months ago, I developed the worst attack of colitis I had ever had; it put me into hospital. Ulcerative colitis is ulceration of the colon, and symptoms are almost unspeakable: bloody diarrhoea, abdominal spasms, pain and vomiting every time you try to eat. This time, the attack was so acute that I gave in to the demands of my specialist - that I take steroids short-term to reduce inflammation, as well as a drug given to kidney transplant patients. Ulcerative colitis is thought to be a disease of the auto-immune system, and this drug reduces activity of the immune system and makes attacks less likely. I could wean myself off the steroids when I was better, promised my consultant; I would have to take the other drug for the rest of my life to prevent flare-ups.

I had resisted steroids for years. Everyone I knew who had taken them warned me never to agree to them unless every other course of action had failed. Friends told me about ghastly side-effects: the face swells up and "pads" (whatever they were) may develop on the shoulders. Taking steroids also makes you manic, I had heard.

They were right. After taking steroids, I found myself with a face like a hamster stuffed with nuts, lying in hospital talking like a mad thing on the phone to friends and springing up in the middle of the night to re-arrange my flowers, when I wasn't staring at the wall re-assessing my life and experiencing the most extraordinary revelations about my past, present and future. The only thing I never knew was whether my revelations were real or steroid induced, which was worrying for someone who loves to be in control.

When I got out of hospital, the side-effects were worse. With so much more scope for action, I found myself waking at three in the morning compelled to do things. My house was spotless as a result of frenetic cleaning. At night, I'd find myself clearing out kitchen cupboards and medicine chests, spraying the glass on all my pictures with cleaner, gluing a whole year of photographs into an album and rearranging furniture. I even drove to Ikea, weak as I was, bought a new bed, and constructed it until three in the morning before sleeping on it. I was euphoric, I was manic, I was exhausted.

"You must rest," said my friends as I complained of feeling shattered and frenetic at the same time. But you can no more rest on steroids than you can walk in a straight line after drinking a bottle of whisky. You are just driven to act. My consultant told me the story of a patient on steroids who amazed his family by cleaning the house from top to bottom at two in the morning and then taking his German Shepherd Dog for so many runs on Clapham Common that the poor animal had to be taken to the vet at dawn. Of course, all this is amusing as a funny story, but it's not very entertaining to find yourself up a ladder compulsively dead-heading roses by the light of the intruder lamp in the middle of the night.

On top of this manic behaviour, I was irritable and impatient, snapping at any friend who expressed alarm at my behaviour. And I looked dreadful. I had turned into Bessie Bunter, with a couple of repulsive long hairs growing from my chin. Call me fattist, but I'd look at myself and see a stupid fat person with little bow lips sticking out from fat cheeks: an idiotic, comfortable, complacent, unattractive fat woman. I knew the type. It was a fat-faced type. It wasn't me.

Coming off the steroids was no more fun than being on them. Since steroids repress the action of the adrenal glands, you have to come off them slowly to give the glands a chance to start producing the corticosteroid hormones that suppress inflammatory reactions. If you come off steroids too quickly, there is a risk of death. The side-effects of withdrawal included a new illness called arthralgia - a mixture of arthritis and neuralgia which woke me with agonising shooting pains. For weeks, I felt even more extraordinary than before, the mania slowly wearing off and mixing with exhaustion, panic attacks and misery. My hands shook, my knees felt like jelly, I slept for days at a time, I sweated and felt shivery. The symptoms, I am told, are very similar to those a heroin addict experiences when coming off drugs.

So much for steroids. I'm still not convinced they did the trick that bed-rest would not have achieved - it had done so before, although I'd never been that ill. When I finally got off them, I still felt terrible, and worse, I still suffered from diarrhoea, to a degree more painful and embarrassing than when I had ulcerative colitis. Dragging myself to my GP (the consultant was on holiday), I had a blood test which revealed that I was suffering from an allergic reaction to the other drug I'd been taking; it was, in her words, rotting my liver. I appeared to have all the symptoms of hepatitis. Some enzyme of which I was meant to have no more than 30, I had 579 of. Something else of which I was meant to have no more than 30, I had 367 of. The allergic reaction was also causing the acute diarrhoea. I should stop the pills at once.

Now, more than two months later, and just getting back to normal, I realise that the side-effects of orthodox drugs can be as dangerous as Chinese herbs. My faith in Western medicine has been completely shaken, rather like discovering Christ didn't exist. Orthodox medicine is simply another therapy, not necessarily the best.

I feel a complete chump for having clung to such double standards. One moment, I am warning my son against the dangers of E; the next, I am shovelling mind-altering steroids into my mouth that virtually changed my personality. Another moment, I am smugly getting a liver-function test before taking Chinese medicine, so suspicious am I of accepting dried herbs and potions doled out to me by a man who can speak hardly any English, wearing the dodgy white coat only used now by charlatans and operating from a converted private house in Ealing; the next, I am quite happy to poison myself for two months with medication prescribed me by a perfectly charming man with a public school accent, Savile Row Suit and swish consulting room.

Yes, these drugs might indeed have saved me from a colostomy. I will never know. But I wish that before I had embarked on this chain of pill- taking, I had applied the same scepticism and caution to the fruits of orthodox research as I had to alternative medicine. Is one really better or worse? It seems to me that each is just as dangerous and chancy as the other. I'm not so sure I won't pluck a hair from my head and pop down to the allergy clinic. You never know.