Our Role and Mission
Dr Patrick Magovern has decades of experience in the investigation and treatment of medically unexplained symptoms and complex/unexplained illness.
Primarily our role is to help the patient who has exhausted the options offered by ‘standard’ medicine.
We are not part of mainstream Irish ‘evidence-based’ medicine, and we use a significant amount of emerging therapies – interventions we have found to be successful and promising, but which have not been proven in double-blind trials. Our ethical premise is: the patient is unwell NOW and cannot afford to hang on for another twenty years until the appropriate treatment may move into the mainstream. We utilise treatments which we find to be safe and effective.
The common assessment in standard Irish medicine of what we do is best encapsulated in what a GP colleague said to me during a late-night discussion: “from what I hear you seem to get good results, but what you do really is psychotherapy – you really are just doing the listening cure, because I doubt if many of those people whom you see and who get better were ever really sick”. Our approach is much broader than this!
All of the treatments we use are used regularly in the U.S., and in other parts of the EU by a small but significant minority of doctors, and have excellent safety records.
The medical model we use is based on the functional medicine approach. We use pharmaceuticals (where safe and appropriate), nutritional interventions including nutraceutical and Intravenous nutrition, medical ozone and also mind-body therapies in situations where patients need help ‘re-booting’ and healing their nervous systems.
Our aim is to find out:
- Irrespective of the disease/diagnosis, what is going wrong biochemically for this person i.e. why do they have these symptoms?
- How I can help to restore them to vibrant health instead of them being condemned to drag themselves through life on a daily basis totally dependent on a bag of pharmaceuticals.
- How to improve the overall health of the patient, so that in future years when Drummartin Clinic is far away in the rear view mirror, your overall level of health lifelong will be improved.
- Think of what we do as an add-on to your standard medical treatment and not a replacement for it.
- I work in parallel with your own G.P. or consultant. I do not replace your G.P. or consultant. Your G.P. is the appropriate person whom you should first attend with any new medical problem.
- Before making an appointment: if you have any worrisome medical symptoms, weight loss, unexplained night sweats, change in bowel habit over 40, please do not immediately seek functional medicine treatment – the first thing to do is to see your G.P. and get his or her evaluation and advice. Irish General Practitioners are very skilled in acute diagnosis. So please first bring symptoms which need checking out, to your G.P. before coming to see us.