ABSTRACT
This is the story of my journey as a patient, a twenty year quest to experience healing from persistent, often debilitating, symptoms of an increasingly common chronic condition. Writing is a large part of my chosen profession, but this is one of the more difficult pieces of writing I have undertaken. I am a mid-career academic social scientist, specializing in matters of health systems and health policy. My story is given shape and colour by this professional background as I am inherently interested in how people get access to, and experience, health services. I still believe that these things are vitally important, but my story also demonstrates the limitations of seeking healing through medical care, and its various interventions and pharmaceutical treatments. I have a very positive experience of integrated MindBody work, and at the end of this Chapter I make a modest attempt to convey what the experience was like for me. However, another reason I want to tell this story is to relate, from a patient perspective, just how difficult it can be to find MindBody work, even though I had been primed for it for nearly twenty years.
