One day, a patient asked “What is wrong with the girl waiting outside? She is miserable, cannot even hold her head up,” when he came for his treatment, talking about a 12-year-old girl, waiting with her parents for her turn and I replied “I will examine her after you but she probably is a migraineur. Then, as soon as I saw this little girl, I understood what the other patient was trying to say. Poor girl was having headaches all the time.
Aysegul, not being able to lift her head, hugged me desperately as to say “Help me please.” She had been having headaches for 6 years and the pain, present every day in the last year, was keeping her away from school. She was only going to school one day a week and the weights she put on because of the drugs making her unhappy.
In addition to the 12 sessions of acupuncture in the last month, she was also having 2 or 3 injections each week in the buttocks for the last 7-8 months! Her mother said “Doctors told that these injections do more harm than good but when she desperately begs, I take her to the hospital myself.”
I have seen several patients suffering unbearable pain but amongst children, this was the worst case I had ever seen. A child, having injections this often voluntarily was a remarkable thing. Appropriate neural therapy (as few needles as possible) might be very effective in children but I do not choose to apply this in the first encounter. However with Aysegul, I did not even need to think about it because she was already having much more. Then, when she came back she told me that she did not have any headaches since our first session. She was holding her head up and also happy at home. This was the first time she was pain-free for 3 days in a long time.
That day, I thought to myself “Even though it is really hard, I am happy that I deal with these patients and that I developed ‘Gokmen Approach’. Stopping Aysegul’s pain alone is worth my efforts.”