When I was growing up, there were constant remarks from my parents and other "grown-ups" that as you got older you also became wiser and more experienced. I never had much truck for these cynical platitudes when I was young and full of idealistic world visions of honest people dedicated to the development of a better, safer and more healthy future.

During my lifetime, and particularly during the past 15 years, I have been at the receiving end of frankly outrageous diagnoses from a variety of practitioners, some of them fairly high profile and well-respected within their discipline. There was the hypnotic regression by a homoeopath for a sore throat and loss of my voice, which produced the astonishing assertion that my mother had been my lover in a past life and had tried to strangle me as a baby in this lifetime! For the same complaint there was another hypnotherapist who regressed me back into past lives and said that I had been burned at the stake during the 14th century for being a homoeopath! Then there was the inordinate attention paid to some white marks on my nails by a medical physician as evidence of a nutritional deficiency, whereas in truth I had merely got some white paint on my nails!