What Critically Ill Kids Can Teach Us

"In 2013, Shay Beider accompanied an anxious little boy into the office of Dr. Fayez Ghishan, the Physician in Chief and a pediatric gastroenterologist at Diamond Childrens Hospital in Tucson, Arizona. The boy was soon to undergo an endoscopy, an invasive scope to examine the digestive tract. Such procedures could be traumatic for children because they required an IV placement; nurses often had to chase children down the hall and administer a shot to sedate them. So Beider asked Dr. Ghishan if she might try Integrative Touch Therapy on the boy, one of the many services she was pioneering through the nonprofit organization she founded, Integrative Touch for Kids (ITK). Within minutes, the boy was calm. Nearly asleep, in fact. "Oh my God," Dr. Ghishan remarked, "you need to do whatever you do for all of my patients!"

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