Strictly Come Dancing star Amy Dowden and her family were left feeling helpless while struggling to get answers from medical professionals about the dancer’s health issues.
Strictly Come Dancing professional Amy Dowden, 36, and celebrity hairstylist Chris Appleton, 43, were full of energy on Saturday night as they performed their Cha Cha to I’m Always Here from Baywatch, which earned them a total score of 17 from the judges.
However, it wasn’t that long ago that Amy was forced to take time off from the BBC series due to her health battles. After being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023, she took a break from the ballroom to undergo treatment, including chemotherapy and a mastectomy.
She now shows “no evidence of disease” and is back competing for the Glitterball trophy after having a second preventative mastectomy in November 2025.
However, the dancer still lives with chronic inflammatory bowel condition Crohn’s disease. She eventually got her diagnosis at 19, having suffered debilitating pain, sickness, fatigue and repeated hospital stays since she was a child.
Amy had got to the point where she was hospitalised for six weeks while feeling the most unwell she’d ever felt “in my life”, forcing her dad, Richard, to intervene.
Speaking on The Lewis Nicholls Show podcast, Amy remembered the frustration both she and her family felt when one doctor brushed aside her symptoms, telling her to “go and eat a Mars bar” after wrongly assuming she had an eating disorder.
The inadequate care from healthcare professionals became so alarming that Amy’s father Richard warned of potential legal proceedings.
Describing her mother Gillian’s heartbreaking reaction, the Strictly star said: “I can remember my mum burst into tears in that appointment and I was so ill, I was just in shock and I just wanted answers. And then my mum said, ‘well, if that’s what you think, you need to treat her for that then, she needs help’, and they didn’t.
“And I can remember just breaking down in tears, and then when I was 19, I was that poorly, I was in hospital and I was at absolute… I was so ill.
“I don’t think, except from when I had sepsis, that I’ve ever been this ill in my life and they ended up calling my parents at about three o’clock in the morning and I said, ‘I can’t do this anymore’.
“And they came down to the hospital, and the nurses said how poorly I was, and then my dad saw the doctor and he was just like, ‘we can’t take this anymore, we’re going to seek legal advice, you’re not doing anything’. And my dad was like, ‘this is not my little girl anymore. If this was your daughter, you wouldn’t have it.”
Following her father’s frank confrontation with the doctor, Amy was transferred to UCL London after spending six weeks in hospital without any diagnosis. Her new consultant then “took one look at me, listened to some of my symptoms, and said, ‘I can’t confirm it but I think you’ve got Crohn’s disease’.”
Amy went on to describe the “relief” she and her family felt upon finally receiving her diagnosis, as it meant she could access the surgery and treatment required to “finally get on with my life” and pursue her dream of becoming a dancer.
She added: “My parents and I were just so upset because we didn’t feel like doctors were listening to us. I think they saw a skinny dancer and thought, ‘she’s anorexic’, and actually, I do eat, that wasn’t the issue at all.”
Despite her struggles, Amy revealed that her battles with Crohn’s disease had instilled in her a sense of “resilience”, which even proved beneficial when she was later diagnosed with cancer. The Welsh dancer admitted: “It [cancer] was also, in some respect, easier for me, because I’d already been through so many tests from a young age; long hospital stays, injections, infusions, that none of that was new to me.”
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