By Meleni Aldridge, executive coordinator

It was an honour to be invited back to participate in FMC Ireland this month, in the lovely Atlantic-facing, Galway Bay Hotel. This practitioner conference with its roots in functional medicine, was founded in 2016 by the passionate, bright, shining, light that was Maev Creaven. Sadly, Maev passed on 11^th August 2022, leaving a giant hole in Ireland’s functional medicine community. She is still sorely missed, but her family stepped into the breach and honoured her legacy by continuing with the Functional Medicine Ireland conference in November 2022. They have now passed the baton to another passionate, committed practitioner, Gina O’Callaghan, to continue FMC Ireland in Maev’s honour. This year marks Gina’s first year at the helm, and it was a triumph.

FMC Ireland’s 7^th annual conference speaker line up:

Dr Michael Stone, Dr Heather Moday, Rob Verkerk PhD, Leo Pruimboom PhD and Dr Leslie Stone. Expertly MC’d by journalist, Maria McHale.

Top line - Sponsor and Speakers from left to right above: Chris Moore (Sponsor, Nordic Laboratories), Dr Heather Moday, Dr Leslie Stone, Gina O'Callaghan, Dr Michael Stone, Rob Verkerk PhD, Dr Leo Pruimboom.
Second line, 2nd photo from left - Meaghan Esser (Sponsor, ITL Health, MAG365).

A flavour of the content

This year’s theme was “Unlocking Resilience, A Functional Approach to Fostering Inner Strength” and the unique format, that allowed the speakers to speak on both days of the event, proved very popular as it allowed for a proper deep dive.

Kicking off with Rob…

Rob Verkerk PhD - Building holistic resilience across 5 domains: Physical, Mental, Emotional, Social, and Environmental

Rob reminded the audience that the public has long been deceived over the extent to which mainstream health systems can influence our health. He pointed to a US study by Leroy Hood and colleagues from 2016 that showed that only a paltry 16% of health outcomes were attributed to clinical care. Nearly half of outcomes were down to socio-economic factors, then followed health behaviours (34%) and environmental influences (3%). What this means is it’s entirely futile to hand responsibility for your health to the men and woman in white coats. We have to be in the driving seat of our own health – and we have to have a deep enough understanding of the incredibly sophisticated entity that is our body, to be able to influence our health positively.  Sadly, there isn’t much emphasis on this during our schooling, let alone does the average person learn much from their family doctor. Public health diktats aren’t much better: let’s face it, they got it wrong on low fat and cholesterol—would you trust their advice? 

The reality is that even the most well-informed of us have a relatively limited understanding of the inner and outer workings of this incredibly sophisticated organism we call a human. In fact, the body-mind-spirit triad that is central to many Eastern health traditions and philosophies provides us with a more helpful template with which to work.  

In his lectures, Rob delved deep into the levers with which we can work to help direct our health trajectory, recognising that there will always be a continuum between health and disease, that our body always exists in a dynamic state, and at different times in our journey we’ll need to alter our approach to our bodies and minds in order to compensate for changes to our bodies, our patterns of gene expression and our ever-changing environments. Rob came down hard against the long-standing World Health Organization definition of health that most health authorities have adopted since its inception in 1948.

The definition states: “A state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease.”

This definition—the notion of “complete…well-being”—is simply unachievable for the vast majority of us. It makes almost everyone a target for some kind of health intervention—a perfect backdrop for Big Pharma’s monopolistic mission. It contributes to the medicalisation of normal human experiences, from stress and sadness, to menopause and carrying some extra weight. It ignores the dynamic nature of health and probably most importantly, it ignores the fact that health is a human experience.

Rob proposed to the assembled doctors and other practitioners that a model—the adaptive cycle—developed by the Canadian ecologist CS Holling could be very helpfully applied to patients and clients, so they could understand the changes that are implicit in any changing ecosystem, whether in a natural system or—as in our case—an anthropogenic one that often exists in the netherworld between natural and built environments. The model has four phases, two that represent the front loop (growth/exploitation and conservation) of a figure of 8, another two (release and reorganisation) that represent the back loop. The release—letting go—phase might seem like a time when things go backward. But like the fruits falling in autumn, that’s all part of the next cycle, the re-seeding of life. The reorganisation phase can also seem bleak, but, like the winter in a deciduous forest, there is a huge amount going on underground and within the trees and shrubs, none of it visible to the naked eye, that spawns the massive growth the following spring. New growth that is better adapted to the changing environment. And so the cycle goes on.

There isn’t the space here to delve into the wealth of science and ideas that Rob referenced as he took the audience through a journey of the levers that can be used to influence physiology, psychological health, emotions, social interactions and our environments. So, we’ll leave this for a future article, but also hope that we can point you to the conference videos as soon as they’re available.

Dr Michael Stone - Exploring Root Causes of Health and Disease Through Functional Perspectives and Enhancing Resilience through Collaboration and Nutritional Strategies

Dr Michael Stone shared his deep wisdom, extensive experience and insight into health and healing through a functional medicine lens. He is also an ardent supporter and educator of the ‘physical exam’. The examination of a patient that was the bedrock of any medical consultation, where your doctor actually touched you in order to physically examine your health, whilst listening to you speak about it. As well as being passionate about why it’s such an essential element that’s at risk of becoming a lost art, Dr Stone is also one of those rare doctors that really does ask, “how do you feel?” and then cares enough to listen to the answer. It’s thanks to Dr Stone that the advanced training in physical examinations that help’s detect nutritional imbalances has led to the establishment of the Nutrition-Oriented Physical Exam course within in the Institute for Functional Medicine.  

Having been dealt a pretty health-damning set of genetic cards and experienced significant health challenges in early life, Dr Stone is more than cognisant that each individual has unique and interacting genetic and epigenetic factors that are clearly reflected in the physical exam, lab markers and nutritional deficiencies. His love and appreciation of the physical exam was born out of necessity. As a med student on the Thai-Burma border, his task was to do a nutrition assessment of 250 children in an orphanage in the Karen tribe, with nothing but the same gifts and tools that the physicians of the past had—eyes, ears, sense of smell, the ability to look, listen, feel, and in that instance, set out different bowls of food to try to do, through a translator, some idea of a 24-hour recall. So, many years later, he’s brought this knowledge into a functional nutrition and medicine model and is responsible for changing the way many health professionals conduct their consultations.

It was an honour to hear from both Drs Michael and Leslie Stone sharing clinical pearls and insights from 40 years in practice. Below you'll find a link to their Grow Baby initiative, led and co-founded by their nutritionist daughter, Emily Stone Rydbom, in collaboration with DNALife. Grow Baby is all about growing healthy babies using the power of genomics, nutrition and functional medicine. Dr Leslie Stone was the keynote speaker at the gala dinner where she elaborated on the key principles behind Grow Baby. With more than 6,000 deliveries in her career, if you're involved with fertility or mums-to-be, you'll find her a compelling educator and their work in this area fascinating.

Dr Leo Pruimboom - From Homo Sapiens to Homo Fragilis: Exploring the Interconnected Pathways of Chronic Disease and Strategies for Building Resilience through Clinical Practice

Dr Pruimboom, as always, didn’t disappoint and offered a rich feast of knowledge through the lens of Clinical Psychoneuroimmunology (CPNI). It gave a welcome added evolutionary dimension to the conference juxtaposed with the deep functional medicine wisdom shared by Dr Stone, and Dr Moday.

Having opened with the pronouncement that “every disease is doomed to be cured”. Leo went on to introduce the idea of the ‘connectome’ and offer that every disease begins with a loss of connection between the brain and the immune system. Hence his entreaty to remember that “everything is everywhere” (in the body) all at the same time. Why? Because the immune system is actually a cognitive system that tastes, smells, hears, touches, sees and responds to our environment. Our neurology and our immune system work in concert throughout our lives. Without this connection and the direction offered by the neurological system, our immune system doesn’t know where or how to respond appropriately. This is why you can’t separate physiology from psychology when it comes to dysfunction and disease and why every disease can be labelled as psychosomatic.

Throughout his 4 hours of lectures, Leo took the delegates on a journey through our evolutionary history from ‘Nature to Culture’ and elucidated with copious evidence why modern life causes a low-grade inflammation from which there’s no end. Our genetic blueprint, which is perfectly adapted to the lives we used to live in nature, is largely at sea in modern life—culture. There is so much in our modern life today which moves us towards disconnection and away from connection, that you could say, we’ve transitioned from Homo sapiens to Homo fragilis. Yet, reconnection is at the heart of finding our way back to health and resilience.

Given that the brain and the immune system develop in parallel and are mutually supportive, when their connection is maintained, the probability of producing a pathological response is next to impossible. Hence, Leo’s presentations wove a colourful, evolutionary tale, taking into account the activities and actions that allow the brain’s neurology to keep arborising (form tree-like structures), creating new connections and pathways, whilst maintaining connection with the immune system. Neurodegeneration being the diametric opposite, emerging from a brain that has the lost the ability to arborise amongst other imbalances, and in so doing lose connection with the immune system too.

We deep dived into the most significant impacts of ‘culture’ (modern life) on our health; the ‘immunengram’; reward deficiency syndrome; eudaimonic vs hedonic living; the impacts and intricacies of leptin and cytokine resistance and so much more.

>>> If you’re a practitioner whose interest in CPNI or Dr Leo Pruimboom has been piqued, please mark your calendar for Friday 7^th March 2025. Leo and Rob Verkerk will be holding another Masterclass in central London, which will also be livestreamed for those further afield. You can also purchase the recording of their last Masterclass.

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