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Case Study - James
James first saw a Sunflower Practitioner about ten years ago at the age six or seven - he is now 17!
To start at the beginning with James, luckily he was born a couple of weeks late because two weeks before his birth we had been involved in a car accident and our car was spun around on collision. Apart from the bruising of the seatbelt and a twisted ankle and black eye, I was remarkably unscathed. James waited until his father was out of hospital before making an appearance. After 12 hours of labour he was delivered by emergency caesarean and they found the cord had been tightening, wrapped three times around his neck. Once out in the world he was fine and I awoke to see a bright blue beady eye looking at me from the cot in my room.
This was a typical James-look I was soon to find out, always wanting to see what was going on. He was a lively baby, colicky at first and then settling but not sleeping through the night until he was over three. He passed all the milestones of sitting, crawling and walking at the expected times. Being my first child I didn't realise that he was quite advanced on the shape sorters and jig-saws and his understanding and use of language. It was just how he was, always busy and interested in new pieces of information and playing imaginative games
My parents were teachers so they were always telling me how clever James was and much as I wanted to believe them I thought it was mainly first grand-child syndrome. We moved a few times in James's first few years but he always made new friends and played happily with other children. So far no problems, which was why James starting school and not progressing as quickly as average came as quite a shock.
I had purposely not taught him to read and write before school age because I thought it best that he learnt through whatever system his school used and had the pleasure of progressing with his friends. Towards the end of his first term his teacher asked me if he had a hearing problem and I laughed and said that his hearing was very good but, if he was engrossed in something, he had a listening problem. I let them test his hearing, which was as I expected, quite normal. When I helped at the school I did notice that James found the level of general noise disturbing and found it difficult to filter out what was an instruction. The whole class could go to change for PE and James would look bemused at where they were going. The school then mentioned that his small motor skills seemed poor. This again surprised me. I knew he was hopeless at colouring in pictures in side the lines because this did not interest him, but he could draw his own pictures perfectly well and had always loved to draw. From a year old he could put the pieces in a peg hole jig-saw or all the shapes in the correct holes of a shape sorter. This was one of the examples of contradictory behaviour that were manifesting them selves through his school life versus home life.
School was uncovering a child I didn't know. The reading didn't progress too well, which surprised me for a child who loved books and stories and had such a wide vocabulary. I think the problem was that he was not interested in the simple stories he was learning to read. At home he had books about animals and facts that interested him and stories that captured his imagination. I think James virtually taught himself to read with those books that interested him, instead of the school reading books we worked through each day.
It was the writing where we really became unstuck. At six or seven a teacher called me in and said James was still having trouble fitting a word on a page. This was when I brought him to see a Sunflower Practitioner.
As usual Sunflower Therapy began started with his structure and James liked the way he was spoken to, as though he was someone who would understand. It was not like going to the doctor when they look you over and then just talk to your parent. Some of the structural problems probably went back to that car crashing into us before he was born, causing the umbilical cord to wrap around his neck. Mark then went through the usual Sunflower tests to find where there were imbalances in his system and finding what was needed to correct them. The most interesting thing that we found was that James went weak if you put a pen in his hand and asked him to write. Mark did a number of exercises with James and one of the greatest things that came out of that very first session was that Mark showed James that he wasn't stupid and that there were reasons for him being as he was and hope that things could become easier for him. Mark told him that there were many measures of intelligence and that his school work was only looking at a select few. This rebuilding of his self-esteem was crucial to James' future progress.
James took the medicines Mark gave him and this is not easy with a child that does not swallow tablets, but you can always grind them down and mix them with water and juice, not ideal but acceptable. James persevered with the medicine because he could tell it was doing him good. Over the following sessions James looked forward to his time with Mark and was pleased that someone was interested in him and the progress he was making. The confidence he'd had before school, started to return.
As I mentioned at the beginning James is now 17 and trekking around Bolivia. He has had varied school life as we went off to Indonesia for a couple of years but when he returned to school in the UK he won class prizes and surprised us all winning the maths prize at the end of prep school. He now has ten GCSE's 2 B grades and the rest A's including two A*s in French and Spanish – an unusual achievement for someone with dyslexic tendencies. He has just taken 5AS levels.
James and his brother Michael still ask to come for appointments with Mark. Michael, my younger son will always be grateful that he saw Mark when he was five. At that time Michael was asthmatic and told he would always need an inhaler. By working through the Sunflower Method the asthma went and Michael has not needed an inhaler since, and there was a time when I would not risk going out without his ventolin.
These days the boys want Mark to put their bodies back in place after the rugby season or help them boost their immune systems when they cannot shake off a virus.
I can say without doubt that without the help of Mark and the Sunflower Method James would have struggled a lot more through school life and I doubt that he would be facing the future with the same splendid exam results that he has achieved today. The little boy who knew the names of all the animals has grown into the young man determined to go to university to become a zoologist. For this I thank you.
James wrote:-
"The Sunflower Trust makes optimum use of knowledge of the body's various systems and cycles in treating injury and illness alike. This knowledge, of how chemical and structural imbalances affect our everyday functions, is indispensable and has helped eliminate many of my problems, which seemed incurable through conventional medicine. I would like to see this method of treatment more available to everyone and think that with more research this could well push back the boundaries of modern medicine and prove beneficial, especially to this country's dyslexic population".
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