Passionate about family health and a food-first approach to preventing illness, she now specialises in autoimmune and digestive conditions including Crohn’s, ulcerative colitis, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gluten sensitivity and coeliac disease. Through her clinic she also supports people of all ages with food intolerances, offering a wide range of personalised testing options.
Karen’s childhood was peppered with health issues but nobody saw the link. “I was on antibiotics constantly. I had terrible sinus problems, and when I was twelve I had the inside of my nose cauterised. I reacted to all kinds of foods. But no one ever looked at the whole picture, they just treated each issue separately.”
In her late teens and twenties she was diagnosed with IBS, a label Karen now believes to be vague. “IBS doesn’t explain anything,” she says. “It doesn’t ask why. It doesn’t ask how. It’s just what you get told when they can’t figure it out. I was given the usual medication and sent on my way. So I just learned to get on with things.”
Friends who’ve known her since childhood tell her now, “You were always complaining about your tummy,” . At the time I genuinely didn’t think I was sick. I thought, this is just how my body was and so I just got on with it. Only years later, when I studied nutrition and looked back, did I realise I’d been living with symptoms my whole life.”
She explains that not everyone with IBS or gut problems goes on to develop Crohn’s, but she had the underlying vulnerability. “I have Crohn’s genes. I had a lot of antibiotics. I had eczema and asthma. All those early-life immune and microbiome issues were there. I didn’t understand that then, of course. But now, with everything I’ve learned, it makes sense.”
Karen was finally diagnosed with Crohn’s at 33. “Initially they thought it was a UTI. I was in and out of A&E in different hospitals with this horrific pain, and nobody could figure it out. I didn’t look sick and that throws people. You can look perfectly healthy and still be utterly crippled inside.”
It was 2007–2008, when the internet was just starting to become widely used and this allowed Karen to start doing some research. “I started googling my symptoms,” she says. “Crohn’s kept popping up. I asked the doctors if they thought it could be Crohn’s?’ But misdiagnosis is incredibly common with Crohn’s. People can go years without someone joining the dots.”
When the diagnosis was finally confirmed, she didn’t have the emotional space to absorb what it meant. “My daughter had just been born,” she says. “I didn’t have the time for sitting down and thinking, I have an incurable illness. I was just trying to keep going. It actually took years before the significance of it really hit me.”
While Karen now knows she carries the genes she believes there were multiple triggers that caused it to be switched on. “There’s never just one trigger,” she says. “I’d had so many antibiotics growing up, and we now know that sets the stage for gut issues. I had three awful cases of food poisoning in the months before my diagnosis. And then emotionally, my dog died, I lost my job, I got married all within a short space of time. My dog dying absolutely broke me. I’m a huge animal lover, and that grief hit me hard. I genuinely feel that was the thing that tipped everything over. Emotional trauma is such a powerful trigger. I see it again and again in the clients I work with now.”
Karen’s health deteriorated rapidly. “My pregnancy had been great, but in 2008, on my honeymoon, I became incredibly unwell. I was put on mesalazine, it did nothing. I remember calling SouthDoc in the middle of the night because I was shaking uncontrollably with rigour. It was terrifying. Then I was put on big doses of steroids and still there was no improvement.”
By early 2009, the young mum was pleading to be admitted to hospital. “I knew something was terribly wrong. I was on IV steroids every time I went to hospital. I couldn’t take anything orally because my gut was so inflamed. And meanwhile, I was getting sicker and sicker.”
Scans eventually showed the extent of the damage. “I had fistulas – holes throughout my intestines. The doctors would say, ‘You look fine,’ but inside I was falling apart. When I saw the scans, I didn’t know how I was still alive. No type of Crohn’s is good, but I had an extremely aggressive type”
Surgery was meant to be quick. Instead, it became a five-and-a-half-hour emergency operation. “They had planned to do keyhole surgery” she says, “but when they opened me up, it was so bad they had to convert to open surgery. They removed two-thirds of my large intestine and a section of my small intestine.”
Before the operation, Karen had been warned she might wake up with an ileostomy bag. “They placed the bag on my locker. The nurse told me, ‘Hopefully you won’t need this. When you wake up, if it’s still there, that’s good news.’ When I woke up, the first thing I did was check and the bag was still there. I cried with relief. I knew how lucky I was.”
Recovery took weeks. “I was tiny,” she says. “I’d lost so much weight. But my surgeon, Dr Morgan McCourt, was incredible. I met him in the corridor and said, ‘My sister is in Dubai, I am supposed to be going there in three weeks. Will I make it?’ He said and I quote ‘‘If you pass gas, you’re on your way.’ Meaning the stitching was holding. And he was right. Within five weeks I felt like a different person. That surgery saved my life.”
A few months later, her consultant suggested a powerful medication with serious potential side effects. “I wanted another baby,” she explains. “I remember sitting in that chair, thinking, I’ve just fought so hard to get my life back. I can’t take something that could take so much away from me. When I told my doctor that I didn’t want to take the medication he said, ‘I don’t know if this is a good idea.’ I said that I was willing to take my chances. It was terrifying, but I felt something inside me saying I had to try another way.”
That “other way” began, surprisingly, with a simple question: what should she eat after bowel surgery? “I asked the staff, ‘What can I eat now?’ and they said, ‘Whatever you want.’ I was stunned. I’d just had major intestinal surgery. How could food not be part of the conversation?”
On her hospital bed she found a book, Breaking the Vicious Cycle, and followed its gut-focused diet meticulously. “I was an engineer,” she says. “I approached it like an engineering problem. I removed certain grains, reduced additives, and baked constantly. I was trying to stop driving inflammation and give my body a chance. So I chose the food first approach.”
Gradually she stabilised. “Every year on February 24th, the day of my surgery, I celebrate another year without relapse. I haven’t gone back to how I used to eat, because that clearly wasn’t serving me, but I don’t feel restricted now. I just know what works for me.”
In 2010 Karen enrolled in a three-year nutrition course. “I had two small children, but I thought, I will do whatever it takes to stay well and to ensure that they wouldn’t get unwell. I never planned to open a clinic. I just wanted to keep myself and my family healthy.”
But as people saw her transformation, they began asking for help. “They’d say, ‘You were so sick, how are you so well now?’ And slowly, without planning it, my clinic was born.”
Today Karen works with people living with Crohn’s, Colitis, IBS and more, using functional testing to personalise diet and lifestyle. She studied food and believes you only remove something when there’s a real reason. One diet does not fit all. Conscious of ingredients, Karen gives examples of things like emulsifiers. She explains “They’re in so many processed foods, especially in plant-based milks and yogurts. Carrageenan, E407, things like that and they can strip the lining of the gut. I started reading labels religiously. I tried to make as much as I could from scratch, but as we know that isn’t always practical. You just don’t realise how many hidden things are in our food until you start looking.”
Lifestyle is equally crucial, she advises. “Stress and sleep are massive. Almost everyone I meet can trace their illness back to a period of intense stress. Cortisol changes the microbiome. Stress physically affects the gut. People are told to just ‘manage their stress,’ which is impossible if they’re still living in the circumstances that made them sick. The biggest healing I’ve ever seen has come from people who take a long, honest look at their lives – their jobs, their relationships, their boundaries. Some leave jobs, some end toxic relationships, some restructure their entire lifestyles. It’s incredibly difficult, but it’s absolutely transformative. You cannot heal if you stay in the environment that broke you.”
On biologics, she is balanced. “I’ve seen people do well on them, although I am aware of the potential shocking side effects and I’ve seen people struggle terribly. I’m not against them. I’m not for them. I’m for asking why Ireland jumps straight to the heaviest medications without exploring diet or the microbiome first. In other countries, these things are the starting point.”
It upsets Karen that many people go years without hearing that food matters. “People say to me, ‘I’ve been on medication for ten years and nobody ever talked to me about diet.’ And that is wrong. At the very first appointment people should be advised about the medical qualities of food. Not instead of medication, but alongside it. People deserve hope.”
Seventeen years after her surgery, Karen remains off all Crohn’s medication. She rebuilt her health, changed her career, and created a clinic that now helps others find the hope she once fought to find alone.
“If I could tell people one thing,” she says, “it’s that hope is real. You are not powerless. Your diet, your lifestyle, your stress levels, your sleep, they all matter. Work with your doctors, yes. But also realise you are part of your own solution”.
And for many people, that realisation is where the healing begins.
To read more or contact Karen see kwoptimumhealth.ie
Discover more from All About Cork
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
