"Having had breast cancer twice ..."

What I liked

Having had breast cancer twice in my thirties, I have been receiving treatment in the form of Iscador and homoeopathy at the RLHH during the last couple of years. This has helped me tremendously to cope with a whole range of side-effects resulting from chemotherapy. I have found the medical staff very supportive and extremely well trained and during the last two years I felt I was in much better hands than when I was receiving orthodox cancer treatment alone.

It is very upsetting to hear that the RLHH is threatened with closure as a number of PCTs seem to think that complementary treatments don't work. They do! They have obviously fallen victim to a very clever and self-serving campaign by the pharmaceutical companies who want to push more and more of their products into the market. How can it be that the NHS spends millions of pounds on pharmaceuticals (that often don't work and/or have serious side-effects) when in many cases there are much more effective and much less costly holistic remedies available to treat patients?

What could be improved

The only thing that could be improved is to give the RLHH back the space it first had available after the renovation was completed. When I first visitited the RLHH it was a lovely and airy space full of light and with green plants dotted around. It was a place that put its patients and their healing above everything else. In the last 12 months or so, more and more other NHS departments have moved in, leaving only a small and pretty crammed space for the RLHH. What a shame.