{"id":774882,"date":"2026-11-10T07:46:22","date_gmt":"2026-11-10T07:46:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/774882\/"},"modified":"2026-11-10T07:46:22","modified_gmt":"2026-11-10T07:46:22","slug":"cancer-diagnosis-a-more-functional-approach-to-being-thrown-off-the-roundabout-of-life-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/774882\/","title":{"rendered":"Cancer diagnosis: A more functional approach to being \u2018thrown off the roundabout of life\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Gina Donnery received a double cancer<\/a> diagnosis at age 40 and was given a 50 per cent chance of surviving another five years, she felt she had just been \u201cthrown off the roundabout of life\u201d.<\/p>\n

In the process of removing endometrial cancer that had grown into the ovaries, doctors realised from scans, she says, that they had cut through a second cancer in the cervix. It wasn\u2019t one linked to HPV but a rare type. \u201cThey put me at stage four, basically, right away,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s really then you find out that jobs, material things \u2013 nothing matters.\u201d<\/p>\n

She and her husband, Robert, were living in Hong Kong at the time, with their two young children. The couple had left Malahide, Co Dublin, nearly 20 years previously, after he landed a pilot\u2019s job with Cathay Pacific and she embarked on a successful real estate career.<\/p>\n

The diagnosis came a year after she had lost both her parents back in Malahide in quick succession. Her father to cancer; her mother five weeks later to \u201ca broken heart\u201d.<\/p>\n

Donnery recalls sitting in front of doctors who said they would throw everything at her cancer, but they did not know if it would work, nor what harm the treatment might do. While family and friends rallied around saying, \u201cyou\u2019ll beat this\u201d, she struggled to understand \u201cthe concept of \u2018beating\u2019 something that I grew, basically\u201d.<\/p>\n

Feeling alone \u201cin a body that was broken\u201d, she applied her logical, business brain to what might have led to this. She did not smoke, drink or take drugs, but was in the habit of joining a gym every year and never going. However, there had been years of stress, juggling a corporate career with motherhood, and then came the double parental bereavement.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it was just the tipping point,\u201d she says 12 years later, sitting in the smart, spacious livingroom of her home in Malahide, where the family returned after Donnery had finished her cancer treatment in Hong Kong. At the time, she was determined to learn all she could about the development of cancer and what she might be able to do to help herself.<\/p>\n

She went on a journey of research, avoiding reading \u201canything where they were trying to sell me something, or [where] a person died at the end\u201d.<\/p>\n

A game changer was the book Anticancer: A New Way of Life (2007) by doctor-scientist David Servan-Schreiber, which she read in two hours. Having been diagnosed with brain cancer at age 31 and given six months to live, he threw himself into studying scientific evidence of lifestyle changes combating cancer.<\/p>\n

\"GinaGina Donnery. Photograph: Dara Mac D\u00f3naill\/The Irish Times <\/p>\n

Donnery was upset to learn, only at the close, that the author had since died at age 50, after cancer returned. However, his detailing of what science said about how nutrition, exercise and other lifestyle measures could fight as well as prevent cancer, started to change her mindset.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had something to hold on to and I felt as if I had a small bit of control.\u201d<\/p>\n

She had no intention of refusing conventional, medical treatment, she stresses; this was about what she could do for herself alongside it. For instance, she would buy lots of fruit and vegetables when she was heading into chemotherapy sessions and exercise the day after. She went to counselling and started to apply psychological and biological lessons to her life. \u201cI changed everything about myself. I tried to find ways to reduce stress. I tried to find a purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was helped by the family being able to return to Ireland after her husband transferred to London with Cathay Pacific. Over the next 10 years Donnery studied biomedicine, nutritional therapy, naturopathy and herbal medicine, which led her to functional medicine. \u201cI had this absolute appetite to soak in all the science behind how the body works and how we can change and heal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her new life passion and business background combined when she was approached to take over the Irish Lifestyle and Functional Medicine Conference<\/a>. It was founded in 2016 by the late Maev Creaven, a nutritional therapist from Galway, to bring research-based resources in an evolving field to healthcare practitioners of various disciplines.<\/p>\n

So, how best to explain \u201cfunctional medicine\u201d, when even the name is derided by some?<\/p>\n

I put this question to Dr Joel Evans, a US obstetrician\/gynaecologist and director of the Centre for Functional Medicine in Connecticut, who will address the annual conference in Dublin later this month.<\/p>\n

\u201cFunctional medicine is real medicine that looks at how the body functions, because the body can function in a suboptimal way before you\u2019ve been diagnosed with a disease,\u201d he replies in a video call from Stamford, Connecticut. \u201cA conventional doctor may say that you\u2019re healthy but a functional medicine practitioner, because they\u2019re looking through the lens of how the body\u2019s functioning, says, \u2018No, you\u2019re not okay\u2019. We want you to function in an optimal way, as opposed to just making sure you don\u2019t have a diagnosis of a disease.\u201d<\/p>\n

He gives the example of a patient with elevated blood pressure but who has not yet crossed the threshold for a diagnosis of hypertension. A conventional doctor may suggest close tracking of their blood pressure, \u201cwhereas a functional medicine doctor will come up with a lot of things to do to make sure that you don\u2019t develop high blood pressure. So, it\u2019s an active approach for the prevention of crossing that line of a diagnosis.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201csweet spot for functional medicine\u201d, he says, is where people may feel great but want good health, wellness and longevity. Equally, it is \u201cperfect\u201d for people with a diagnosis of something such as diabetes<\/a>, or pre-diabetes. \u201cWe understand the role of lifestyle and how it affects blood sugar.\u201d<\/p>\n

The links between stress, sleep, inflammation, nutrition and blood sugar can all be looked at.<\/p>\n

\"DrDr Joel Evans is director of the Centre for Functional Medicine in Connecticut <\/p>\n

What drew Evans to functional medicine was \u201clearning that there were things I didn\u2019t learn in medical school. For example, I had a patient with breast cancer who was told by her oncologist that it didn\u2019t matter what she ate. I did not, in my training, learn about nutrition and cancer but she asked me to look it up, and then I found out about a relationship between sugar and cancer. I was never taught about that, and that got me angry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Conventional medicine benefits from people taking a functional approach, he says, and he believes there is a role for people other than doctors, such as nutritionists, in the latter. \u201cWhy? Because food is the number one cause of ill health \u2013 and the number one solution to getting healthy is eating properly.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, as there is no shortage of nutrition misinformation swirling around, Evans says the burden is on the customer to make sure the nutritionist has an appropriate level of certification.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0I had my first breast check in my mid-thirties \u2013 here\u2019s how it wentOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Indeed, \u201cbuyer beware\u201d applies across the board, as anybody could call themselves a functional medicine practitioner. There is no professional association in Ireland and one of Donnery\u2019s ambitions is to set up a registry. In the meantime, there is a list of those who have qualified for International Board of Functional Medicine Certification on ifm.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The RCSI\u2019s Centre for Positive Health Sciences (CPHS) in Dublin offers a course in lifestyle medicine, elements of which sound similar to functional medicine. Both fields, along with integrative medicine, are parallel structures that have been emerging since the 1990s, says Dr P\u00e1draic Dunne, an immunologist and lifestyle medicine professional who lectures at the CPHS. All three take a holistic approach in addressing root causes of disease and incorporate the impact of mind and emotions. The big difference, he says, is that lifestyle medicine concentrates on behaviour, while functional medicine focuses on physiological and biological metrics, involving blood tests, for example.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf anything, functional medicine goes deeper into the physiology, so therefore has more of a backbone than lifestyle medicine,\u201d he says. Both would attract scepticism from people who belief conventional medicine is the one, true way.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem with lifestyle medicine and functional medicine is it\u2019s very hard to do large trials,\u201d says Dunne. \u201cIt\u2019s much easier to do a trial if you\u2019re looking at a single medicine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whereas these personalised approaches involve more complexities and, although there are plenty of smaller studies, there are few on the scale that some would consider \u201cproof\u201d.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0How\u2019s your gut microbiome? How to spot trouble in the \u2018second brain\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Evans, who straddles conventional and functional medicine, knows all about pushback from mainstream colleagues. Critics describe elements as \u201cpseudoscience\u201d and argue it can involve overuse of testing and supplements. <\/p>\n

\u201cThose of us that have been lecturing in this field for many years still have PTSD from some of the critiques, so we go overboard with teaching the science that justifies this philosophy. Then there\u2019s also something called scientific plausibility, which means it makes sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

For instance, \u201cyou don\u2019t need a ton of science\u201d to show losing weight can help with depression, he says. \u201cThe mechanism is when you\u2019re overweight, you\u2019re inflamed; fat cells produce inflammatory chemicals.\u201d Through the gut-brain connection, inflammation in the gut leads to inflammation in the brain, which is now linked to depression.<\/p>\n

\u201cResearch is coming from the conventional medical world that is validating what we\u2019re doing,\u201d Evans adds. \u201cThere are departments in major universities studying the gut microbiome \u2013 that used to be fringe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Donnery wants to change the narrative around functional medicine in Ireland and to promote the idea that practitioners could work alongside GPs, to support people with chronic ill health. Doctors are so pressurised they do not have much time for each patient, she points out. Whereas functional medicine practitioners can give people the time and space to tell their story and take a \u201cdeep dive\u201d into what might be the root cause of their illness.<\/p>\n

\"GinaGina Donnery. Photograph: Dara Mac D\u00f3naill \/ The Irish Times <\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t diagnose in any shape or form,\u201d she stresses and will refer on for any element that is outside her scope of practice. Her role is to support people to understand themselves better and \u201cwith my experience and the science behind it, put a plan in place for them\u201d.<\/p>\n

Food and lifestyle are both \u201cmedicine\u201d, she says, but in this era of convenient, ultra-processed foods, people lose sight of how real, whole food is a chemical messenger to support healing and regeneration in the body. \u201cI don\u2019t heal anybody. What the body needs is homeostasis and that means all your body systems working together in harmony.\u201d<\/p>\n

She is heartened to see an increase in the number of doctors signing up for this year\u2019s two-day Lifestyle and Functional Medicine Conference in Croke Park on November 14th and 15th, which is for healthcare practitioners only and is accredited for CDP (continuing professional development) points. Even if doctors decide it is not something they want to embrace, greater understanding of the concept would, she believes, be beneficial for all.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0How Ireland got hooked on ultra-processed foods \u2013 and the only viable solutionOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

One summer\u2019s day, five years after Donnery\u2019s diagnosis, her husband took a call from Hong Kong in the kitchen of their Malahide home. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt was the doctor that treated me to see if I was still alive, because I was a statistic, right? He didn\u2019t ask what I was doing or how I was, he just wanted to know if I was dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Happily he could be told she had crossed to the positive side of that 50 per cent statistic \u2013 and hasn\u2019t looked back since.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Gina Donnery received a double cancer diagnosis at age 40 and was given a 50 per cent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":774883,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[78],"tags":[110,18,135,19,17],"class_list":["post-774882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-cancer","tag-eire","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117591040879352785","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=774882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774882\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/774883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=774882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=774882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=774882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}