Under pressure

Matthew Willey recalls the days before the internet, and an old friend

My friend Maggie had a wasting, incurable illness. If that sounds awfully sad, well, it was. But we had a great friendship and toured Nottingham pubs until I was as unsteady on my feet as she was. I would lean heavily on the handles of her chair as I pushed her back to her house after "Time please ladies and gentlemen" had been called. In the daytime we painted watercolours by the canal and campaigned against nuclear weapons, back in the days before the internet.

But her illness was heading in an obvious direction, and she became dependent on her wheelchair with or without the warm ale she was fond of. Then we heard about a new treatment that was being promoted by an American medical company. Posters went up advertising a lecture on 'hyperbaric oxygen treatment'. We were naturally curious.

In a crowded church hall a lecturer stood and described a marvellous new treatment, offered to us despite resistance from the medical establishment. Hyperbaric oxygen treatment, he said, was the treatment that could reverse the effects of multiple sclerosis. He showed us slide after slide of graphs, testimonials and photomicrographs that demonstrated how, by sitting in a chamber at high pressure and breathing pure oxygen, patients' brains healed themselves. He showed us many 'before and after' photographs of healed brain cells. It was the chance we had been waiting for, and we signed up for a course of treatments.

Once a week I would drive Maggie out to an industrial estate where the company had set up its chambers. The chamber was big enough for about half a dozen hopeful patients, all paying big money to sit for an hour in a high-pressure metal sphere and breathe oxygen through a mask.

Maggie would take a novel (Maya Angelou), and I would peep in and wave through the tiny porthole.

Afterwards she felt better, and we were jubilant at actually being able to do something hopeful together. Sure enough, in the following week we would see signs of improvement.

Our excitement faded over time. Improvements we thought we saw at first did not last, and her illness progressed. We stopped spending money on the treatments, and bought beer again. She could drink less and less, and the course of her illness followed an unusually steep pathway. She died as her namesake Maggie Thatcher fought to hold onto her position as Prime Minister.

We had had but one source of information. Now, in the days of the internet, I can look up Hyperbaric Oxygen on Google, and quickly find that it doesn't work. At least not for multiple sclerosis, or autism, or brain injury or a dozen other ailments it still claims to treat. I also find websites where the same false hope is offered, with the same convincing presentations, and on the same pitiful evidence.

Nowadays I think about the money we spent, and the precious time we wasted on a treatment that arose out of nothing more than desperation and easy answers. One question would have been enough to nail those people, and that is: "Show me the evidence." I know now that a grand claim such as his requires really good evidence, and for a cure for multiple sclerosis I'd want a pile of peer-reviewed studies in proper journals, like the British Medical Journal. I would not be satisfied with a few slides and photos, not any more.

Wiser now and better informed, I am sadly aware that this is the area where predators still lurk, ready to take money off people like Maggie and myself.

We should have pocketed the cash and gone to that Talking Heads concert in London instead. I'm sorry Maggie, if I'd been just a little more clued up, we could have had more fun.