Doctor gets attacked despite giving good news

According to news reports from Wednesday, Mehmet Cengiz Çepoğlu, a neurosurgeon at the private Medical Park Tokat hospital, located in the Turhal district of Tokat province, will not be able to perform surgery for at least a month due to the attack.

Reports said the patient's father, Aslan Gani A., had been taking his 13-year-old son, T.A., to various hospitals over a long period of time. Past examinations led to the boy being diagnosed with a brain tumor. The boy was later referred to Medical Park Tokat for treatment, where Dr. Çepoğlu said the growth inside the boy's brain was not a tumor but gliosis, a condition caused by scarring of the brain tissue by a proliferation of cysts.

Doctor Çepoğlu gave the good news to the concerned father, who had long believed that his son had a tumor in his brain; however, he was attacked in response. The doctor, whose nose and hand were broken in several places during the attack, was saved from the hands of the raging father by his colleagues. Aslan Gani A. was detained by the police after the incident.

A shocked Çepoğlu, who spoke to police at the hospital, said T.A. had earlier been diagnosed with a brain tumor, but he had established that the boy did not have one. “Then I gave this good news to the family. They have been to many doctors and were told the child had a tumor. I told them, ‘Good news: It is not a tumor; it is gliosis. We will give him new medication,' and they left happily. They came back after half an hour and told me: ‘Stop it with this gliosis thing. We'll file a complaint against you.' There is nothing more I have to say. I leaned down to write down the word for them to look it up on the Internet later on, but [the father] hit me in the nose just then. When I lifted my arm to protect my face, he hit my hand.”

The doctor will have to undergo surgery for the fractures in his hand. “I won't be able to perform surgery for a month. I have a patient in intensive care who needs to be operated on immediately. He came from İstanbul just for the operation. I also have a patient with a spinal tumor. There is another patient from Sivas, and another one from Amasya. Now I will have to tell these patients that they can't be operated on because of this incident. I am very sorry.”

Dursun Bulut, the general manager of the hospital, said the administration condemned the attack. He said Mete Bayburtlu, a doctor at the hospital, will be performing surgery on the attacked doctor's hands on Thursday.