I am a dentist and completed my studies in 1994. However, my path quickly led me into the field of orofacial pain, which is why I completed my continuing training at the Orofacial Pain Center at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, USA (Prof. Dr. Okeson) from 1999 to 2000.
From 2000 to 2014, I coordinated and managed the outpatient clinic for temporomandibular disorders and orofacial pain at the CharitéCenter for Oral Health Sciences at the Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, where I mainly treated patients with chronic and neuropathic facial pain.
During my career, I became more and more aware that many, if not all, pain patients not only suffer from their physical pain, but also from the psychological and social consequences that chronic pain brings with it. Although medical and pharmacological treatment is quite good these days, the psychological and especially social aspects are still very often neglected, which is why it is not surprising that our treatment results sometimes do not meet our expectations. This seems to be at least partly due to the fact that there are still far too few psychotherapists and even fewer social workers specializing in pain.
Lucjan - Pixabay
For this reason, in addition to my existing competencies, I decided to study person-centered counselling (according to Carl R. Rogers) (Master of Art, M.A.), which has changed my interaction with clients even more in this direction. My experience was and is that social, and often also spiritual aspects of pain often become more of a focus for my patients with increasing duration of the pain. Based on my person-centered training and my experience with many pain patients, I therefore developed a holistic, socio-psycho-biological treatment approach that can also include spiritual aspects, in which you are always on an equal footing in every phase of treatment and in every decision and are at the center of our cooperation.
This also means that, subject to your consent of course, I will work with your doctor and your other practitioners on an interdisciplinary basis and would like to promote cooperation between all disciplines involved. The reason for this is as simple as it is important: Only when the competencies of all disciplines come together and complement each other, only when "one hand knows what the other is doing", can you as a patient really benefit from it.