At age 40, Gina Donnery was given a 50 per cent probability of living another five years after a double cancer diagnosis, leaving her feeling as though she had suddenly been thrown off the roundabout of life.
Doctors discovered the second cancer, a rare type unlinked to human papillomavirus, while removing endometrial cancer that had grown into her ovaries. She and her husband, Robert, were living in Hong Kong with their two young children at the time, roughly two decades after leaving Malahide, Co Dublin.
The devastating news arrived barely a year after Donnery lost both of her parents in Malahide in quick succession. Her father died of cancer, followed five weeks later by her mother to what she describes as a broken heart.
Faced with doctors who admitted they would throw everything at her condition without knowing if it would work or what damage the treatment might cause, Donnery struggled with the popular refrain that she would beat the disease.
Feeling alone in a broken body, she applied her corporate and logical mindset to examine what had led to her illness. While she did not smoke or drink, she had endured years of intense career stress and double bereavement.
A turning point came when she read the 2007 book Anticancer: A New Way of Life by the late doctor-David Servan-Schreiber. Though saddened to discover the author died at age 50 after his cancer returned, Donnery found practical guidance on how nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle changes could combat the disease alongside conventional medicine.
She maintained her medical treatments while altering her lifestyle, eating habits, and stress management techniques. After returning to Ireland, she spent a decade studying biomedicine, nutritional therapy, naturopathy, and herbal medicine, eventually taking over the Irish Lifestyle and Functional Medicine Conference.
Dr. Joel Evans, a US obstetrician-gynecologist and director of the Centre for Functional Medicine in Connecticut who is scheduled to speak at the upcoming Dublin conference, explained the discipline’s philosophy.
Functional medicine is real medicine that looks at how the body functions, because the body can function in a suboptimal way before you’ve been diagnosed with a disease.
Evans noted that functional medicine is for people who may feel great but want good health, wellness and longevity, and is also perfect for people with a diagnosis such as diabetes or pre-diabetes. He added that they understand the role of lifestyle and how it affects blood sugar.
Dr. Pádraic Dunne, an immunologist and lifestyle medicine professional who lectures at the RCSI’s Centre for Positive Health Sciences (CPHS) in Dublin, says functional medicine, lifestyle medicine and integrative medicine are parallel structures that have been emerging since the 1990s. Each of these three embraces a comprehensive approach to target foundational causes of illness while factoring in the influence of the mind and emotions.
Donnery takes great encouragement from the rising registration figures of physicians signing up for the upcoming November 14th and 15th Lifestyle and Functional Medicine Conference at Croke Park, a two-day event restricted to healthcare professionals that carries CDP accreditation.
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