About

Jo retired from medical practice in 2015, having previously worked in Southampton, Oxford, Cambridge and Norwich. She trained in Gastroenterology and General Medicine, and worked as an Acute Medicine Consultant diagnosing and treating a wide variety of conditions, some clear, others ambiguous.

In her early 40s she suffered a mystery illness, which baffled doctors. She started falling over, forgetting things and getting lost. Her symptoms had all the hallmarks of dementia. However all the investigations were normal. She also had prominent exertional fatigue as experienced by many sufferers of chronic fatigue syndrome, and painful hands and feet, with associated restless legs.

Frightened that she wouldn’t live to see her children grow up, scared that she was unable to fulfill her role as a mother and desperate to find the cause for these devastating symptoms, Jo became the doctor and the patient. She found a treatment that slowly reversed her disease and sought an explanation for why this had all happened in the first place and how the treatment worked.

What she discovered and wrote about in her memoir has the potential to be groundbreaking and change the way we think about dementia and other diseases, including diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia and even anxiety. She thought this was the missing piece of a puzzle that scientists had been trying to find out for decades.