I thought celebrity osteopath was my friend ...then I found out he was a twisted pervert

Osteopath to the stars Torben Hersborg will be sentenced today after being caught spying on female university students. His arrest before Christmas shocked his client base, as patient of five years LESLEY-ANN JONES writes

- Lesley-Ann Jones

HE was the man with the magic hands, a gifted reliever of pain and suffering who changed countless lives, including mine.

I met the acclaimed osteopath Torben Hersborg in early 2021 after a fall down stairs at home that left me in such agony, I could barely walk.

My fellow writer and friend Mark Edmonds, who tragically died last year, recommended him to me.

Torben had "fixed him", Mark assured me. "He can fix anybody." I must state from the outset that I am not the kind to be swayed by quackery or lofty claims of miracle cures. I had always steered clear of holistic therapy and alternative practices, investing my faith firmly in traditional medicine and surgery.

I had heard alarming tales from friends and family members whose pain had been exacerbated by careless chiropractors and boisterous physios.

I knew little of osteopathy beyond its somewhat sinister reputation for bone-cracking.

I dragged my ailing carcass, nevertheless, to Hoxton: a pocket of cool on the City of London's fringes, where Hersborg helmed his scruffy, no-nonsense practice, the Central London. Osteopathy and Sports Clinic.

There, on a precariously narrow blue bench before a wall of one-way mirrors, allowing us to look out on to the street but no onlooker to see inside, Torben bent, doubled, cricked, cracked and cured me.

At my first consultation, when he asked me to bend over and touch my toes, I failed to reach my fingers below my knees.

By the fourth bi-weekly session, he had me placing my hands flat on the floor beside each foot. I left the surgery with a spring in my step that I couldn't remember feeling since my twenties.