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.

Drummartin Clinic

At Drummartin Clinic we have vast experience of over thirty years of investigating and treating medically unexplained symptoms.

Our aim is to find out:

  • What is going wrong for this person i.e. why do they have these symptoms?
  • How can I get them back to vibrant health and well-being rather than merely existing courtesy of all the pharmaceuticals taken every day?
  • We hope that by finding out what is wrong we can also make you healthier for the rest of your life so that you age better and have quality-of-life in your later years.
  • We do not replace your own G.P. or specialist.Please 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 and competent 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.
  • In Ireland, the range of complementary medical treatments on offer is far behind the continental EU. The prevailing paradigm in Ireland is pharmaceutical.
  • Irish medicine does not accept and, mostly, ridicules naturally based therapies including functional and nutritional medicine

  • The attending doctor has made a diagnosis and you are actively undergoing treatment,but there is little or no improvement in symptoms.
  • The patient is not satisfied with the diagnosis ie. fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, migraine syndrome, premenstrual syndrome,  or ‘depression’s and the patient wishes to drill down and find out what is going on biochemically and treat at a causal level rather than purely medicating the symptoms
  • The patient is going from doctor to doctor and feels a they are not being heard this would include fatigue situations, chemical sensitivity, brain fog and mild cognitive impairment, Post viral syndrome. Mould problems will usually also fall into this category.
  • The patient ‘cannot take’the usually prescribed medical treatment this will include people who have difficulties taking anti-inflammatory drugs, difficulty taking steroids and who are intolerant of antidepressant medication.
  • The patient is complaining of symptoms which sound bizarre and may make the doctor wonder about the patient’s mental state and which may also make the patient doubt their personal sanity. This will include people suffering from unusual symptoms such as electromagnetic sensitivity/sensitivity to electric shocks, atypical  ticks,  spasms and seizure type events. Some of these symptoms may be referable to mould or to chemical sensitivity
  • The patient has been told: “there is nothing physically wrong with you”. This group comprises a high percentage of our patients and also will include a lot of patients from the ‘unusual symptoms’ group immediately above.