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Hi everybody,

We love acronyms in medicine. MRI = Magnetic Resonance Imaging; PERRLA = Pupils Equal Round and Reactive to Light and Accomodation; CPILF = Coma Patient I’d Like to … ahem. One of my favourites is IANAN – “I Am Not A Neurologist” – which is usually scrawled before a largely misinformed statement by somebody who has no clue about the brain. Now IANAN, but epilepsy is pretty cool.

Rather, it’s the lack of epilepsy in society that’s cool. Epilepsy is the tendency to suffer recurring seizures, and affects around between one and two per cent of the population. Seizures occur when your brain mucks up and fires incorrectly. Given that last sentence, it’s amazing we’re not all constantly fitting!

To read this sentence you have to move your eyes in order to pick up the light it reflects, which can then be converted to an electrical impulse and conducted to the brain, which receives that impulse and sends another to the interpretation centre, which recognises that the initial light involved language so sends yet another signal to the language centre of the brain, which alerts the brain to the fact that this sentence is dragging on and tells the eyes to stop reading it.

One to two per cent is a bloody low error rate, especially as not all seizures are shaky-shaky-Christchurch-quakey (“tonic clonic”) events. A simple partial seizure may be as minor as producing a strange smell. However, if ever you do come across a person having a seizure, there are some important things to know:

1) Move things out of the person’s way and gently cushion their head.
2) Don’t stick anything in their mouth.
3) Time how long the seizure takes.
4) Place the person in the recovery position afterwards.
5) If the seizure lasts more than five minutes (it’ll feel like 50), the person is injured, or they don’t regain consciousness before fitting again, call the ambulance.