Get Well Soon: Adventures in Alternative Healthcare

If you were diagnosed with a condition for which there was no known cure, what would you do?

Nick Duerden is a writer and journalist. This is his memoir about a long period of ill health, and how he was forced to plunge, like it or not, into the often bewildering ­– but increasingly blossoming –­ world of alternative therapy in pursuit of a cure.

He followed strictly regimented, vitamin-rich diets, and swallowed all manner of supplements. He smeared himself in coarse mineral salts, and grew tepid in Epsom salt baths. He visited energy practitioners and spiritual gurus. He learned yoga, how to meditate, to breathe properly, to face his fears and manage the new anxieties those very fears had done so well to engender. Over the course of three years, Nick’s lifelong cynicism is gradually replaced by an open eagerness to try anything, if not quite everything and in doing so, he starts on the road back to health.

Get Well Soon is a memoir that focuses on the journey all of us will at some point have to face: the abrupt obligation to start living better, wiser, healthier, to be kinder to our minds and bodies by realising that minds and bodies do require care. It’s about what happens to life when you become ill, because everyday life is never going to stop going about its chaotic business.

This is not a self-help book. But it is, in its own candid, unflinching and stumbling way, a mapless guide to belatedly learning to live well, to negotiating a very particular, and all too common, midlife crisis. It is honest, and funny, and ultimately optimistic. And it might just offer proof that self-discovery, even when it is enforced self-discovery, is no bad thing.