If you are thinking of using complementary medicine, please consider the following:

1. Registration

Almost anyone can set themselves up as a complementary therapist: they often need have no qualification, or have attended only the briefest of training sessions, so be careful.

• To whom could you complain if you felt you were being unfairly treated?
• Does the therapist have a professional indemnity insurance?
• A reputable practitioner will have registered with a bona fide organisation which will insist on certain standards.

2. Cost

Most complementary practitioners are available only on a private basis: i.e., you can expect to have to pay! Treatment of a long-term chronic illness will almost invariably mean repeated visits, sometimes weekly or monthly for a number of years. With ME/CFS in particular, be aware that few people, if any, can predict the course of your illness, even when you have been under their care for a length of time, so many treatment regimes can be open-ended and can become expensive. Some treatments, however, are available on the NHS, so ask your GP.

Some treatments come with a money-back guarantee. It sounds as if you can't lose, but make sure you understand the terms and conditions, and get them in writing. A 90-day money-back guarantee on a food supplement for instance might depend on you taking the supplement for the full 90 days; but within only a few days, some people with ME/CFS find that some substances don't agree with them and can make their condition worse.

3. Effects

• Healing crises - It is not unusual for people to start to feel worse before they feel better with some of these treatment methods; alternatively, it is an unfortunate feature of ME/CFS that you could react adversely to a treatment which is apparently 'harmless'. If you have any doubts, you should discuss them with your practitioner.
• Placebo effect - Many people who are sceptical of complementary methods attribute any benefits perceived to the placebo effect (ie that a patient will improve simply because they believe they are receiving effective treatment). This is indeed a possibility, but if improvement is due to this, it may be only temporary.

4. Choice

There are many complementary options available, so it can be difficult to know where to start. Unfortunately with ME/CFS, there do not appear to be particular methods which give consistently helpful results so if you are keen to try complementary methods, you may need to be prepared to try a variety of approaches, or even a combination of approaches.