When Alice Greene followed the family tradition and became a GP, it never felt right. She might have been the daughter of two doctors, but the harsh reality of medical school knocked her off course from the start. On day two at Trinity College Dublin she walked into her first anatomy lesson and recognised the dead body lying for dissection as a family friend, a man she had last seen at dinners cracking jokes. He had donated his body to science. “There was a sense of unreality, ” says Greene, “I felt two worlds colliding, the living and the dead.”

On another afternoon, during her clinical training, she recalls talking to a young woman suffering from serious kidney failure. The woman died and the next day Greene attended her first post-mortem. It was on the same woman. The technician used an electric saw to cut through the woman’s skull to remove her brain for examination.

“As her facial features sagged, I remember the hairs standing up on the back of my neck in horror with the sense that I, too, was just a skeleton in a rubber mask,” Greene says.

She believes that her experiences in the dissecting room were pivotal when deciding whether or not to continue in the mainstream of doctoring.

Now, nearly 30 years later, she has a successful practice on Harley Street, but the Buddhist poem on the wall and the teddy bear on the examination couch indicate that she has left her conventional medical roots behind. Her frustration with what she sees as the limitations of conventional medicine have led her to use homoeopathy and psychotherapy as the mainstays of her practice.

What is it that drives a doctor away from conventional practice? Greene believes that being limited as a GP to dishing out drugs played a part. She feels that mainstream medicine does not treat patients as a whole but just as a collection of symptoms. She remembers a woman with a disfiguring skin condition being dismissed in A&E because she wasn’t an emergency. But Greene listened and referred her to a specialist. A few days later, six Waterford-crystal glasses arrived with a note. It read: “Thank you for listening when no one else did.”

But patients weren’t the only ones not being listened to. On her first night shift as a newly qualifed hospital junior doctor, Greene kept a patient alive through the night, transfusing ten pints (5.7 l) of blood into him. It bled out of him just as quickly, but she knew that if he lived until morning the surgeon would operate. The man died at 8am. In the canteen, she cried over breakfast but nobody discussed the incident: being tough was part of the culture.

This fed Greene’s growing anger with conventional medicine. At the time she felt isolated but, looking back, she believes that she wasn’t alone — that it was a journey that every doctor takes: “Some people take the route of denial; they end up disowning their feelings, just surfing on the surface. Often they go into technically demanding jobs such as surgery, where such sensitivity is not needed but their skills are. My route was different.”

Her search led her to study full-time for a year at the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital and she took her new skills with her when she worked as a GP at three successive practices. She often felt patients came to her with minor problems that didn’t require medical treatment yet they were distressed enough to seek a doctor. What happens, Greene believes, is that these problems, which may have an emotional component, are medicalised and the symptoms taken to be the main problem. As a homoeopathic doctor, however, she believes in treating the underlying emotional disturbance, without resorting to conventional drugs.

In time, 40 per cent of her patients when she was a GP were receiving homoeopathic prescriptions and her surgery had one of the lowest drugs bills in the area. She believes that the key to healing is the physician-patient relationship. “As a homoeopathic doctor you open yourself to receive all elements of someone: their suffering, their attitudes and prior disturbing events.” In other words, the doctor discovers what happened to the patient to make them feel ill.

The result, she says, is a patient who feels validated and active in his or her recovery, rather than being entirely at the mercy of an all-knowing and controlling doctor. “Homoeopathy has allowed me to be more human and to engage with what really matters to my patients,” she says. “And, more importantly, beyond pathology, I help people to affirm themselves and teach them that they have their own healing.”

Alice Greene’s story can be found in Passionate Medicine: Making the Transition from Conventional Medicine to Homoeopathy, edited by Robin Shohet (Jessica Kingsley Publishers), £9.95

Alternative medics

A 2003 study in the journal Family Practice found that about 50 per cent of GPs in the UK provide access to alternative therapy, while research from the Developing Patient Partnerships, a health education charity, found that 47 per cent of GPs do not believe that they should provide complementary medicine information.

A list of doctors who are also trained homoeopaths can be obtained from the British Homoeopathic Association; 0870 4443950, www.trusthomeopathy.org

Details of doctors who are trained acupuncturists can be obtained from the British Medical Acupuncture Society, 01606 786782; or the British Academy of Western Medical Acupuncture, 0151-343 9168.

The National Institute of Medical Herbalists has six doctors registered; 01392 426022, www.nimh.org.uk

KATE WIGHTON