When Carol Rayman's hair began to fall out, she felt beside herself. "I could not face the thought of going bald," says Carol, who is in her fifties and runs her own tour company.

An eminent dermatologist relieved her of £1,000, told her she had, "male pattern baldness" and suggested she go and buy a wig. "I thought of holidays and imagined the wig floating off in the sea. Going bald takes every bit of femininity away from you. I am a big-hair person. I felt miserable."

Carol, from Holland Park, west London, is convinced that a hairpiece would have been her fate had she not mentioned her condition to her younger brother. John Hamwee, a former City solicitor and university lecturer, had veered away from his more mainstream career path to practice a curious and relatively new therapy called Zero Balancing, and immediately offered to help his sister.

"I have always been frightfully anti alternative medicine," says Carol. "But as I lay on John's couch, I felt energy whisking up from my toes to my head. I could feel a change in my scalp. The next morning, my hair did not fall out."

The effect lasted a few days. Carol had a second session, with equal success, and followed this up with treatment at her brother's surgery at his home in Gloucestershire every six weeks for the past two years. "I dared not stop. Last April, my hair began falling out again, but as soon as I had a treatment, it stopped."

Zero Balancing - known to the cognoscenti as "zeebee" - was developed about 20 years ago by Fritz Smith, an American osteopath and acupuncturist. When Hamwee, newly trained as an acupuncturist, first saw it in action, he was amazed. "Two things astonished me," he says. "The first was that Fritz Smith was in his mid-sixties and worked on 14 people in a row. At the end of the day, he looked better than at the beginning.

"The other thing was the treatment itself. He worked on a woman who had knee surgery for 20 years. He spent ages examining her, but the actual treatment lasted about 10 seconds. He held his hands on either side of her knee. As he did so, I was looking at her face, and there was a moment when I knew she had been healed. She got off the couch and she was better. I was with her for five days and she remained better.

"I watched him treat other people - some with physical problems, some with emotional problems, some with a combination, and he seemed to get to all of them. It was stunning. It still is. The practitioner seems to be doing almost nothing, but the effects are profound."

Zero Balancing is a form of healing, but one with a clear theory and practice that can be taught and repeated. While each spiritual healer differs from the next, all practitioners of Zero Balancing do essentially the same thing.

Their work is based on the Eastern concept that energy flows through the body and, in particular, through bones and joints. It is believed that emotional problems and physical ailments block, disturb or interrupt this force, leading to pain or incapacity.

"It is like having a blockage in the fuel pipe of a car," says Hamwee. "The engine might be fine, but if the juice is not getting through, the vehicle cannot work to its full potential."

The zeebee practitioner places his hands on particular body parts of the client's body - under the head, neck, shoulders and back, along the arms and lower legs - and briefly supports them. This apparently releases the blockages and rearranges the energy so that harmony is restored. The treatment involves very gentle touch with no manipulation - no need to undress. At the end of the session, the client should feel "zero balanced", with no stress or pressure on any particular part of the mind or body.

"If you can find exactly the right place to hold it in exactly the right way, it reassembles the energy quickly and coherently," says Hamwee. "Usually, I know when something was shifted. I can feel a movement under my fingers where previously there wasn't any: it's like holding a hose pipe when somebody turns on the tap.

"There are all sorts of signs. If the eyelashes flutter, it's an unmistakable indication that there has been an energy change in the body. Nobody can fake that. Sometimes, you know beyond the shadow of a doubt that a person is healed. It sweeps over you and the whole room. It's a wonderful sensation."

There are about 60 qualified Zero Balancing therapists in Britain. they do not diagnose, nor do they claim to cure. New practitioners are told not to work on the sick, pregnant women (because mother and baby have separate energy fields) or those with epilepsy.

"You are not looking for what is wrong with somebody," says Hamwee. "You are aiming to amplify their wellness. Instead of pulling out the weeds in the garden, you are trying to grow bigger, more beautiful flowers.

"It is good for people going through difficult times who want to enhance their potential. I also find it is brilliant for people with bad backs, painful hips and stiff necks. The other category is women who have had a difficult childbirth. Clients tell me that afterwards, their work and relationships improve and they enjoy life more."

Skeptics will always query the benefits of such non-invasive treatments and their have been no scientific trials to establish the efficacy of Zero Balancing. As so often with healing, the placebo effect may have a significant part to play.

The therapy is also said to address emotional problems that have been stored in the body. practitioners claim that it can bring about the sort of profound and lasting changes usually associated with long-term psychotherapy. One of Hamwee's clients, a distinguished psychotherapist, had suffered from migraines every 10 days for 20 years. She had three sessions of Zero Balancing four years ago and has not had a migraine since.

"What really knocked her out was not just that the headaches disappeared, but that during the session, she recalled a critical event in her childhood which had not surfaced before," Hamwee says. "Fritz Smith's view is that when something bad happens to us, we react, perhaps with anger. If we can't react, the event is taken to the bone. In particular, he believes, a lot of childhood issues are held in the bone because, as children, we cannot respond to adults behaving badly."

The idea that memory is stored in the bone is difficult to swallow. Hamwee points out that we all know what it is like to feel physical symptoms of emotion - anxiety as sickness in the pit of the stomach, for instance, or fear as a fluttering in the chest and betrayal as a stab in the back.

"Experience is stored in the mind, but why should the mind mean only the brain? Experience is absorbed right through the body," he says. "We understand properly only a small part of illness, and that is how the chemical and mechanical body works or fails to work. It is amazing what range of suffering responds to this therapy. I am constantly astonished."