You would think alternative healing required a certain amount of faith. Not so, according to London-based, “bio-energy” healer Seka Nikolic, who believes she can cure people by passing her hands over her patients’ bodies and unblocking energy inbalances.

“I prefer sceptics as patients,” she says. “They are more open. People who are desperate to believe can be negative, particularly when they don’t get the results they were hoping for. But everyone I see is sceptical the first time.” So Julia Campbell Carter must have been the perfect patient.

She sought Nikolic’s help with a thyroid condition three years ago. “When my husband suggested healing I was sceptical,” she recalls. “I’m a lawyer, I’m a doubter and I didn’t believe in alternative medicine. But I was absolutely desperate.”

Campbell Carter saw Nikolic 14 months after Graves’ disease was diagnosed. This is an auto-immune condition that affects the thyroid gland and makes it produce too much thyroid hormone. It had taken nine months to get a diagnosis for her patchwork of symptoms — severe heart palpitations, cold sweats, stomach pain, diarrhoea and weight loss — and she lost 24lb (11kg) and weighed 7st 8lb; she’s 5ft 8in (1.7m). “I had a pulse of 140 beats per minute, she says, “which made me feel as if I had drunk several cups of very strong coffee. One terrible night I actually thought I was having a heart attack. I looked like a haggard old lady and felt dreadful.”

Campbell Carter had seen specialists in her native Germany and London (her husband is British) before a doctor at an emergency clinic in Spain, where she was living at the time, finally concluded that she had the classic symptoms of an overactive thyroid. Further tests at the hospital in her home town of Wuppertal, confirmed she had Graves’ Disease.

She was prescribed drugs to inhibit the production of thyroid hormone, which she took for 14 months, and was advised to take a further course of radioactive iodine drugs to destroy her thyroid (so that thyroid hormone over-production stopped). This would mean taking thyroid hormones for the rest of her life. Faced with such a drastic measure, she decided she had nothing to lose by seeing Nikolic — a Serbian healer who had helped Campbell Carter’s husband recover from ME.

After 25 years of practice, Nikolic claims to be able to diagnose through different sensations in her hands. She also believes the body has positive and negative energy, which must be balanced for health. Her priority, she explains, is to find the areas where the energy flow is blocked. In Campbell Carter’s case this was the head and neck, the latter being the location of the thyroid.

“With my left hand I give positive energy, with the right I draw out the negative. The clicking noise when I flick my fingers is negative energy coming out.”

At the first session Nikolic discussed Campbell Carter’s symptoms and medical history and advised 30 minutes’ healing on five consecutive days. Nikolic asserts: “Thirty minutes is the maximum amount of time that a body can absorb energy. It’s like filling a glass; once it’s full it can’t take more.” When Nikolic was tested at the Scientific Institute for BioEnergy Research in Milan, Italy, in 1988, she says the scientists categorised her above “super normal”, the highest level previously recorded. Electron images of her hands apparently also revealed a halo of energy.

As Nikolic works she produces heat from her fingertips and, because of this, she asks patients to remove watches and jewellery because metal can get hot during the treatment and can interfere with the healing process; for the same reason, she won’t treat patients with pacemakers.

As Campbell Carter lay fully clothed on the bed, Nikolic worked over her body making movements with her right hand, as if she was pulling on strings and then shaking something off, which made a clicking sound. At the same time she held her left hand over the same area.

“Most of the time Seka’s hands moved a slight distance above my body,” says Campbell Carter. “But she also put both hands on my shoulders with quite a firm pressure. It gave an extraordinary feeling of warmth. And, at the end, she stroked my body using long sweeping movements. After each session I would feel zonked,” says Campbell Carter.

Afterwards, she was told to take things as easily as she could with two young children (Jemma, 8, and Cedric, 7) and not to drink any alcohol following treatment because it interfered with the process which was set in motion by the healing. Other patients, particularly those suffering from gall bladder problems or candida, are given advice on diet but Campbell Carter’s was deemed to be perfectly healthy.

After five sessions on consecutive days Campbell Carter says she began to feel better: “Seka said that in a month’s time my blood results would be fine and I would no longer need to take the hormones. She was right. When I had a scan at the hospital a month later it showed that my thyroid had nearly halved in size and my blood results were almost normal. After two more sessions all my symptoms, such as the heart papitations and the digestive problems had gone. I soon returned to my normal weight — just over 9st — and I’ve had no thyroid problems since but I still see Seka twice a year as a preventative measure.”

Nikolic advises all her patients to have a break of up to two months after the initial intensive period of treatment for the healing process to take effect. Straightforward problems such as sports injuries, she claims, often improve quite quickly, while complex conditions such as an over-active thyroid, or ME, can take longer. “Each body is unique: some take longer to heal than others.”

Nikolic claims success with over 15,000 patients, including Prince Andrew and Kylie Minogue. Explaining it, she says, requires a radical rethinking of how the body works — linking energy imbalances with disease. It’s unconventional, to say the least. Yet Nikolic works with GPs who refer patients to her and is listed as a healer by some NHS hospitals.

She encourages all her patients to have medical tests before and after treatment, as evidence that the healing has worked. It is certainly not because of any self-doubt. “Psychologically it’s better for the patients,” she says. “But I know what I have done.”