Dr Minha presented “Supportive therapies, innovative approaches and thinking out of the box” at the Medically Unexplained Symptoms conference, a multidisciplinary gathering held by the Forgotten Patients, Overlooked Diseases charity (FPOD) at the Royal Foundation of St Katharine in London on 1 May 2024. It was chaired by Dr Jay Verma, President of the Royal Society of Medicine’s GP and Primary Care Section, Jeshni Amblum-Almér, the Section’s Past President, and FPOD chair Dr Adrian Tookman.
Medically unexplained symptoms are among the most common presentations a GP will ever see, and among the most poorly served. The conference set out to break what its organisers called the cycle of tests, referrals and unsuccessful treatments: the years-long loop in which patients accumulate normal results and repeat appointments while their lives shrink around symptoms nobody can name. With CPD accreditation applied for, it drew GPs, hospital consultants, nurses, pharmacists, allied health professionals, researchers and patient representatives from across the UK.
Dr Minha’s talk made the case for widening the toolkit. Drawing on Curaidh Clinic’s integrative medicine model, which brings clinical nutrition, botanicals, manual therapies, biofeedback and mind-body strategies alongside conventional medical care, she explored how supportive therapies and genuinely innovative thinking can change the trajectory for patients whose conditions defy easy explanation, from fibromyalgia and ME to Long Covid and mast cell disorders (where overactive mast cells flood the body with histamine).
She grounded her approach in the science. The allostatic load captures the cumulative toll of physical, environmental and emotional stress, while the biochemistry beneath a symptom can be just as telling: mapping a patient’s amino-acid and neurotransmitter profile can show whether the building blocks for serotonin or dopamine are in place, or trace fatigue back to a stalled cellular energy cycle. Where the evidence points to it, she draws on a non-hierarchical network of colleagues across disciplines, including collaborative work on Lyme disease and its coinfections and on mast cell activation in Long Covid, on the principle that the patient sits at the centre and no single clinician holds every answer.
The session sits within an ongoing partnership with FPOD, and a personal commitment: Dr Minha serves the charity pro bono as a medical advisor, because the forgotten patients it champions are precisely the people Curaidh Clinic was founded for.
Explore the full event: Medically Unexplained Symptoms, 1 May 2024, or read the full story in Expert Insights.
