When you write of your children's ailments over Christmas, there is a wonderful remedy for most of children's ear aches. It also works for adults.

Place a drop of onion oil in the affected ear. Onion oil is obtained by heating an onion in a saucepan or similar and after a few minutes some drops of onion oil will accumulate. Garlic oil from a capsule will also do. Lie the person on their side and drop in the oil. Rex E Newnham, Yorkshire.......

WDDTY's Editor replies:

We wrote about our holiday from hell, not to lambast our homoeopath, whom we have the highest regard for, nor to suggest that she provides no emergency cover whatsoever (she referred patients over Christmas to the 24 hour Homoeopathic Helpline; she also uses a locum). The problem is these back up services didn't work for us (see below), and that circumstance highlighted the unique difficulties in providing holiday back up for alternative medicine. These challenges are great; unlike mainstream medicine, homoeopaths are not funded by public money and often work alone or in a small group and so cannot call upon a pool of doctors at hand.

Furthermore, alternative practitioners work very thoroughly with individual patients, so it isn't a case of trading off with anybody who can simply write out a prescription for drugs, as it is with orthodox medicine. We repeatedly dialed The Homoeopathic Helpline (0897 343404) throughout Christmas; alas, the homoeopath on duty recognised that my children required constitutional treatment from a knowledgeable source, which took into account their earlier prescribing history. As soon as we got that from our regular homoeopath, they improved. One to one medicine like this makes an alternative practitioner of any variety almost indispensable and doubly hard to replace with back up.

One way round this, our homoeopath suggests, is for us to keep a diary of this history so that we can present it to a locum when she is away. Perhaps a team of locums could trade holidays and case notes. Readers:other suggestions?

Lest we all get too dewy eyed about doctors, remember that our GPs, as nice as they were, didn't give us anything that worked. As for cancer, there are successful alternative treatments. Have a listen to our Surviving Cancer tapes!