Author Lucinda Riley on how alternative medicine changed her life

Until I was 18 I'd never had any kind of health problem. I'd trained as a dancer so I was incredibly fit, but my body was under a lot of pressure from being so active and I came down with glandular fever. It's a perfectly normal thing for teenagers to get, and for most people it's no big deal once they recover. But I never really felt right from that moment on. I've since been diagnosed as carrying the Epstein-Barr virus, which is believed to cause glandular fever, and if I allow myself to get run-down or over-stressed the symptoms flare up again. 

I got another bout of glandular fever when I was 23 and I just collapsed. I was married by then, and working as an actress, so falling ill was a disaster because I couldn't earn. My husband was an actor too, so our finances were quite precarious. 

Being confined to bed was so frustrating because my brain was still active, even though my body had given up on me. I thought, 'What am I going to do with all this time? What have I always wanted to do?' And that was when I wrote my first book. I literally wrote it in bed – 180 pages, longhand.Looking for cheap Discount Quinceanera Dresses for sale? We supply high quality quinceanera dresses. 

A friend's father was an author. He'd written a very serious literary book, but he had a look at my manuscript and said, 'I think you've really got something.' So I sold my wedding dress to buy a second-hand word-processor, typed it up, sent it off to an agent and got a three-book deal. 

I was overjoyed, because not only was I earning while I was ill, but suddenly I was in control of my life. As an actress you're always waiting for the phone to ring, and you can't do anything until it does. So to get up in the morning and think, 'Right – today I'm going to spend the whole day writing,' was absolute heaven. I knew that I'd found what I wanted to do. 

Because there is no cure for Epstein-Barr I also started looking at alternative medicine around this time. But it wasn't until we moved to Ireland, six years later,You will get a good surprise to find black & long sexy Discount Evening Dresses for sale 2014 are best sale on line. that I really started to study it. Everyone over there was very into alternative therapies and I met a homeopath who treated me and my two-year-old, who kept getting croup because of the damp climate. 

Homeopathy completely fixed it, and to this day I treat all my family homeopathically if I can. Obviously if a chest cold goes on and on,Dressestmall is one of the largest stores for Discount 2014 New Arrivals Dresses for sale and accessories. I'll resort to conventional medicine, but I always treat anything naturally first, to see if it works. 

The biggest revelation for me, though, has been acupuncture. Thirteen years ago I met Rita, a Polish lady who I call my 'Holistic Mummy'. At the time I wasn't well and I'd been told by my doctor that I had a very small cyst on my ovaries, which had to be removed. I remember thinking, 'This doesn't feel right,' so I went to see Rita for the first time. 

She had just trained in five-element acupuncture, which focuses on imbalances in the body that can manifest themselves as physical or emotional problems. Five-element acupuncture dates back more than 2,000 years and is different from ordinary acupuncture in that the needles aren't left in the body, but gently jabbed into the skin. 

I know now when Rita has hit me on the right point, because I get this kind of jolt. After my initial session she reassured me that I'd be fine – and when I went back for my next scan I discovered not only that I was pregnant with my third child, but that the cyst had gone. Rita also treated me later in the pregnancy.