Customer Reviews

110 Puzzling Cases of Epilepsy

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This was a very enjoyable and easy read, even for someone with little background in neurology. The authors pick a very diverse assortment of cases, many of which you don't normally encounter or read about in the literature. Every case is confined to a 4 page report describing background, symptoms, diagnosis, treatment and outcome. The result is a 400-page book that you just can't let go of.

Pros:
1- Enjoyable presentation of every case, clear and concise.
2- Some very unusual cases are presented. Psychogenic seizures, noise induced seizures, munchausen related seizures, seizures after listening to a specific piano piece, seizures induced by the side effects of other anticonvulsants, EPC, and many more. All of which, as you read on, get confirmed by EEGs and later on treated. There are also many cases which are not very unusual.
3- Some original treatments are also proposed for certain cases. Except the usual anticonvulsants and their combinations, the authors expose the benefits to certain kinds of diets (ketogenic), aromatherapy, surgery.
4- You get to see what the doctor in charge was thinking about when he was making the diagnosis, including psychological concerns of the doctor, patients, their families. It's hard to imagine what kind of suffering some of these patients have gone through all their lives when they finally get a correct diagnosis.
5- EEG pictures with nearly every single case.

Cons:
The book presentation is overall really good, though there seem to be several cases that are nearly identical to one another. Also, except for a few original treatments that yielded good results, most of the treatments ( > 80% of them) only involve adding and removing the same small set of known anticonvulsants (e.g: "stopped valproate and started topiramate 200mg") and then giving up if they don't yield the expected results. It's usually a bit of a disappointment when the last sentence in a case is: "After reaching the maximum tolerable dose, the patient still showed no improvement". Fortunately that didn't happen often.