Cherie's not the only one...

Lying quietly on a comfortable treatment couch, mind in neutral, I hear Jeff the zero balancer suggest quietly, "If there's anything you want to let go, let it go now," as he works his fingers up my vertebrae. Suddenly, behind my closed eyelids, I can see great purple blobs take shape, then speed off, as if down a tunnel of light. Quickly, I try to drag my thoughts together - frustrations with work, anxieties about the children, whatever - and watch them sail off with the purple blobs. Ten minutes later I emerge from the peaceful health centre into the maddening world outside and head back to work in a pleasant daze.

Weird, huh? I'm a normal working mother, with the usual pressures of children's needs and office deadlines. I don't wear long flowing purple robes or have that 1,000-yard stare common to aficionados of newage therapies, and yet you'll label me cranky - unhinged, even - for admitting I indulge in treatments like the one above. Or would you?

The extraordinary fuss that has been made in the past week over the alternative therapies in which Cherie Blair has indulged - from shared showers with her lifestyle guru Carole Caplin who "scrubs out" toxins, to visiting the " homeopathic dowser-healer" Jack Temple - indicates a public mind-set that regards anything "new age" with the deepest suspicion.

How, ask the commentators, can a busy, working mother of four with an excellent brain dabble in this kind of lunacy? The answer is simple: it helps. I pursue so many therapies I've lost count, and half the working women I know visit practitioners ranging from reflexologists, masseurs and yoga teachers to homeopaths and even energy healers and mediums.

And as for me? Ten years ago I discovered osteopathy when I developed a bad back. It's mainstream now, but it seemed alternative enough then. The back problem is now largely sorted (not, alas, thanks to bone crunching, but to the physical discipline of Kieser training), but I still see my favourite osteopaths frequently.

Simeon Niel-Asher has become more of a guru than a mere manipulator, sorting everything out from stress headaches to muscle stiffness, while Nish Joshi always has emergency appointments when my shoulders seize up.

Soon afterwards, I took up with Bharti Vyas, self-styled "holistic therapist" and ace facialist, and learned to tolerate the aural acupuncture pins, as Cherie has done. I'm never sure what they do, but Bharti's great motherly hugs, her reassurance that all will be well - and her matchless facial massages - have kept me going back.

I can stumble into her soothing lilac-walled salon feeling that my skull is a size too small for the rest of my head, and come out feeling quite all right an hour later (and glowing - people always comment on the glow). I bet Cherie feels the same.

But my slide into the wilder depths of complementary therapies accelerated three years ago when I began to write more about the subject. A massage junkie to begin with, I've now been hooked by more abstruse forms of bodywork. They have included Trager work (where limbs are wobbled gently to, er, restore mental and physical harmony - and yes, it works like a dream); zero balancing (gentle spine-loosening, which can release emotional blocks); Thai yoga massage (lazy man's yoga, and the only thing that has caused me to sleep for 11 hours straight since I had children); ayurvedic bodywork (more passive stretching); Barry Pluke's "bodyshift" therapy and Kingsley Ogedengbe's famed chavutti Thai (a blend of Indian massage with the feet, and Thai limbstretching techniques). Any one of these at the end of a tough week is my idea of heaven.

The trouble is, however far you jump in with alternative therapies, there is always further to go. But if a therapist I trusted suggested releasing my negative energies via a shared, toxic-removing shower, I'd be out of there faster than you could say "blocked chakras".

And while I've done a course in hands-on healing, I was unnerved to find that the follow-on courses at the same centre were "Unlock your psychic powers" and " Communication with the gods from space".

But I'll admit I have had my bedrooms ghost-busted - by Mairead Neal, an impressive psychic who had come round to be interviewed. My five-year-old daughter Beth was scared stiff of the old man she frequently saw in her room in the middle of the night: scared enough to utterly unnerve both myself and my highly rational nanny. Mairead had a chat with him, sent him on to join the family he'd lost in the war (my scalp was crawling by this stage) and Beth has slept through the night ever since. Would I laugh at someone having their cupboards feng-shuied? Not now.

Beth has also benefited from electronic gemstone therapy, in which lights of different frequencies were shone through diamonds onto the skin. To my astonishment, it reduced her eczema dramatically. The treatment sounds utterly barmy, but Lilias Curtin, the practitioner, is an intelligent, serious-minded lady and well, it did the trick.

Such therapies are so hard to explain that it's easiest not to talk about them. Start espousing gemstone therapy, and you sound naive and credulous. People want proof. "You can't believe that rubbish," they say - but to me it's not rubbish. If it works, that's all the proof I need. And these are therapies where the intellect has little place - it's the emotional and physical response that counts.

I'm frequently told by practitioners that my mind is "getting in the way" of the treatment because I'm trying to observe what's going on.

I'm not dependent on any of these things. To me they're an indulgence, a chance for me-time. If you asked my husband, though, he'd say I'm getting worse.

So far this year, I've negotiated time off from childcare for a holistic yoga break in Lanzarote and an intensive two-day seminar called The Journey, run by a truly extraordinary woman called Brandon Bays, who, having rid herself of a vast tumour by uncovering and releasing the emotions which she feels brought on the growth in the first place, is now teaching this technique to eager audiences around the world.

I came home wrung out emotionally and physically on the first night, unable to articulate what I'd been through, but after another 12 hours of the course the following day, was so uplifted and shiny-eyed that he began to worry I'd been brainwashed.

It would be easy to go off the deep end with all this. I'd never dream of spending £900 on a designer suit, but for a life and body-changing course of Roger Golten's Hellerwork? Now you're talking. But in the meantime, I've a family to look after and a job to do. It's a question of priorities.

And even I have to admit, alternative therapies don't work for everyone. Last year I came across Momo Kovacevic, an exceptionally gifted healer who (bear with me, I know this sounds mad) beams positive energy at you with his right hand, while simultaneously whisking his left hand about in front of you as if gathering up invisible spider-webs, then casting them away. Having gone into the session cross and tired, I came out feeling, quite simply, as if all life's traffic lights had turned green.

I booked an appointment for my husband, feeling such a transformation would benefit him enormously. He rang me later. "I have this extraordinary feeling of lightness," he began, "in my wallet..."