Meet Our Nutritional Therapist:

Jo is a nutritional therapist who retrained after working as a behavioural therapist with autistic children for 14 years. Jo has experienced chemotherapy treatment personally when her young daughter was diagnosed with an auto immune disease aged just 19 months. Despite all of the regular anti-inflammatory medications, her daughter did not respond and as they were faced with fused joints, stunted growth, an associated eye disease not to mention the side effects of the medications which included a gastric bleed, Jo embarked on an extended course of chemotherapy that in suppressing the immune system, allowed horrendous infections to take a hold, within weeks her daughter was hospitalized with pneumonia and other recurrent infections.

Jo knew that she needed to intervene to give her daughter the support she needed to fight the disease and the treatment. Jo had never introduced her daughter to a diet of refined sugars, had breast fed for the first 19 months, had made all her own baby foods, but this was not enough.

Jo swapped from her 50/50 organic diet to 100% organic, cut out dairy, swapped to only purified water, cooked all foods from scratch. As well as remedial massage, reflexology, homeopathy and cranial sacral therapy, Jo traveled to London to start working with a naturopath, who’s advice was to test every vitamin, mineral, essential fat, heavy metal, within the body, to ascertain her food intolerances, and the ecology of her gut.

At only 3 years old, Jo was faced with addressing all of these deficiencies by trying to supplement her daughter, who of course couldn’t take tablets, throughout the day.

Jo’s passion to make her daughter well, led her to study to be a nutritional therapist herself, Jo balanced a poorly child who was still on chemotherapy, with the daily regime essential to fight the disease and the drugs and study, but Jo’s passion on the significance of food in our journey to wellness, led her to complete the course and to be involved in KICT and The Alfie Gough Trust.

Jo currently works with all children supported by KICT and The Alfie Gough Trust, supporting the child and the family to make the dietary changes essential to support the body through treatment, to fight the disease, to repair the damage post treatment and to prevent the disease from coming back by addressing the root causes.

Jo uses her experience as a behavioural therapist, her knowledge as a nutritional therapist and her first hand experience to help families to implement the essential regime required. Not just explaining what to do, but how to achieve this.

Jo’s daughter who is now 8 is in remission, is free of chemotherapy medications and is a happy child who herself understands the importance of making sensible choices around nutrition and supplementation.

Our belief at The Alfie Gough Trust, is Jo’s input is an invaluable asset to each and every one of our families and without this input our children and their families would not make the progress we see. Jo’s support has helped so many of our families through bleak periods when the day-to-day living of a chronic disease is so draining on the family unit.