About Us
Clinical Nutritionist, Michael Franklin MA (Oxon) Dip NS, is the founder of the Allergy and Nutrition Centre. The author of a highly acclaimed book on CFS/ME, he specialises in helping people find the root cause of hitherto unexplainable symptoms. He has written many articles on health for magazines such as Time Out, Health Advisor, Holland & Barrett magazine and Healthy Eating and has been quoted in many other national magazines and newspapers including the Daily Mail and The Guardian. He is a member of the Guild of Health Writers and the Royal Society of Medicine.
One of his articles, The Real Causes of IBS, which summarises his research into 120 cases of IBS, was the cover story in a recent issue of Positive Health magazine.
Many patients have been kind enough to say that Michael Franklin and Wilma Kirsten have an uncanny ability to see the links between their different symptoms and explain to them for the first time in their lives precisely how their health has gone wrong and what they should do about it.
Doctors usually cannot do this. Firstly, they are extraordinarily hampered by the fact that GP consultations last only six or seven minutes. Secondly, and even more importantly, they have been taught since medical school that medicine is compartmentalised: taught that you need a different specialist for each part of the body.
The truth is that most chronic illnesses and most chronic symptoms are multifactorial. They have not just one cause but several different ones. Nutritionists and naturopaths are the only health practitioners trained and encouraged to look at all bodily symptoms holistically - which means looking at them as a whole - ie as comprehensively as possible.
GPs ask most patients two questions or three at the most. Our questionnaires ask 102 questions and contain checklists of 79 symptoms as well as gathering information about which foods the patient is eating and how often he/she is eating them. So our information gathering process is probably 40 times more exhaustive and effective than the average GP consultation. Of course GPs can order tests but we can use those tests too and we make use of certain very sophisticated tests from private laboratories (some of them American) that are not yet available on the NHS and probably won’t be available for at least another ten years.
Wilma Kirsten is an exceptionally able practitioner with a real ability to get to grips extremely quickly with each patient’s underlying health problems and explain them in a lucid, intelligent, articulate manner.
Originally from South Africa, Wilma, who is 39, has a BSc in Nutrition and has been seeing patients since 2005. She has a particular interest in helping patients with fatigue, adrenal and thyroid problems, IBS, intestinal permeability, intestinal parasites, dysglycaemia and almost all those conditions that respond well to nutritional therapy.
Wilma can also be very helpful to patients with asthma and psoriasis. Where conventional medicine had no answer to her son’s asthma, a carefully thought out diet has brought it under control. Her husband recently suffered from work-related stress and from psoriasis and, by carefully regulating his diet according to Wilma’s suggestions, he has been able to reverse both of these conditions.
Wilma is also fluent in Italian and so can be of real help to any Italians living in England with health problems that they have not been able to sort out.
