Mumbo jumbo? Or something which can succeed where all else fails? When conventional medicine can't help and there seems to be no answer for a health problem, many turn to healers. Jan Winter reports.

Barry West believes he was close to death on the rugby pitch when he had an out-of-body experience.

And the crisis which could have ended his life proved to be the episode which led him to switch careers - from a PE teacher to a healer.

He has always believed in the body's capacity to heal itself and seeking to find a new direction for his energies after the accident, Barry became involved in the healing which he now uses to help others.

In 1990 Barry was captain of Wakefield rugby union's fourth team when he was hurt towards the end of a match. "I had broken my neck. I was looking down and saw a body and thought: 'Who's that?' and I thought it must be me. I had no feeling at all," he says.

Initially sent home from hospital, Barry was admitted two painful weeks later for several weeks of treatment. He had broken one of the vertebrae in his neck.

Always fit and active, Barry had published manuals about teacher assessment as part of his expertise in his PE teaching. So he started to attend a stress management course, which included sessions on hypnosis and healing.

Soon after returning to work at Whitcliffe Mount School in Cleckheaton, one of Barry's A level pupils complained of a cricked neck. "For some reason I put my hand there. He started saying: 'What are you doing, sir? It's tingling! Sir, it's getting hot!' and I was saying it was OK. And I was thinking what a crackpot I was and then the child walked off perfectly OK."

He tried the same on his wife's leg and she said it started to get hot, then he tried it on the painful leg which was suffered by the wife of a friend of Barry's - and her pain disappeared.

Barry, who lives in Cleckheaton, now combines hypnosis with healing - and says he has helped sceptics who are amazed to find improvements in their conditions.

He sees his skills as "kick-starting" the body's natural healing processes. He talks people into hypnosis, with deep relaxation, and uses music. Healing sessions are taped for people to take away and use at home.

One man arrived for healing on a joint. He was immensely sceptical - and as Barry did the session, starting to use hypnosis, the man told him it wasn't working. "It was the worst session I've ever done!" says Barry. And when the man arrived for his second appointment not long after, Barry's heart sank. "But he ran upstairs and sat in the chair and said not only was his joint pain better, but after the last session it had been the first time in years when he hadn't had tinnitus." But the man didn't return - his wife rang to say he had felt so well that he had gone and played golf, slipping a disc.

He has no religious faith and sees his type of healing as scientific. He says the DNA of amphibians, such as frogs, is almost identical to that of humans and amphibians have the capacity to re-grow a severed limb or heal wounds without scars. He wonders whether we have the same capacity and what in our minds stops us from being use it.

Barry can be contacted on 01924 468110.

Visit changed Susan's life

At the age of 20, Susan Hewson was told by doctors she would be in a wheelchair by her 21st birthday - and would be staying there for the rest of her life.

She had a deformed back and a twisted spine which worsened when she left her teens.

"Then I slipped four or five discs and was put in a plaster jacket. It weighed a stone. It was a nightmare.

"I was at the end of my tether. I was rolling on the floor in tears - I didn't know what to do with myself it was so painful," remembers Susan, who is now 46.

One evening her father returned from work having heard about a man with arthritis who had been healed by Bradford-based Don Greenwood and Susan was taken there by her family.

"I sat down and I was apprehensive. But when you are in tremendous pain you're past all that. I sat down and he put his hand on my pot front and back and there was tremendous heat.

"Suddenly it felt as if the pot had softened and within seconds, three or four of the discs had gone back in. I could feel his hand on my back - not on the pot but on my skin. I felt a sensation and I lost the pain."

Don says that in Susan's healing - for the first and only time - his hands went through the pot as if it was a liquid and directly onto Susan's skin.

After the healing, she had the pot removed but found she had arthritis in her neck because of having a plaster cast in place. Blood tests carried out by an arthritis specialist showed Susan's body had high levels of the disease throughout her body.

But after another healing session with Don, Susan's blood tests revealed no sign of arthritis.

Twenty five years on, Susan still has the occasional ache - but has led a full life, working full time at Marks & Spencer for more than 13 years.

She now works for her husband, Peter, the man Susan said she could not marry because she feared she would burden him when she faced a lifetime in a wheelchair.

The couple, who live at Scholes near Cleckheaton, enjoyed a Caribbean cruise to celebrate.

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