Episode #147 - Despite Medical Training, A Young Doctor’s Epilepsy Goes Undiagnosed for a Decade featuring Dr. Kelly Tyson
Despite Medical Training, A Young Doctor’s Epilepsy Goes Undiagnosed for a Decade
Episode Overview
This month on Seizing Life® Dr. Kelly Tyson shares her decade-long journey to an epilepsy diagnosis.
The first “episode” that Kelly Tyson recalls experiencing occurred at the age of 16 while she was driving. As a strange feeling came over Kelly, she was able to pull off the road, call her mother, and explain that she was unable to drive. However, more than 10 years would pass before Kelly would discover what she experienced that day was, in fact, a seizure. Kelly estimates that she experienced these episodes 50 to 60 times over the next 10 years or so, and they often resulted in her passing out. It was such a regular occurrence that her college friends would often recognize when Kelly was about to “go down.” Despite numerous visits to various medical experts through the years and majoring in neuroscience in college, Kelly was never referred to a neurologist, nor did she recognize these episodes as seizures.
In this Seizing Life®, Kelly Tyson details how she managed these episodes throughout college, graduate school, and medical school even as they became more frequent and severe. She reveals the surprising way that she came to realize the episodes were very likely seizures, details her journey to a diagnosis, explains how an underlying anxiety disorder contributes to her epilepsy, and how both have been treated with medications. Kelly’s experience is all too common for many people who live with epilepsy, and, as Kelly herself notes, that is why it’s important for those with epilepsy to share their experiences. Through speaking up and sharing, we raise awareness, understanding, and the likelihood that those with epilepsy will receive more effective treatment and achieve a better quality of life.
Episode Transcript
Kelly Cervantes:
Hi, I’m Kelly Cervantes and this is Seizing Life, a monthly podcast produced by Cure Epilepsy. This month, I’m happy to welcome Dr. Kelly Tyson to the podcast. Kelly has lived with epilepsy since high school through college, graduate school, medical school, and her current hospital residency. However, for much of that time, Kelly was unaware that she was experiencing seizures, despite having studied neuroscience as an undergrad and pursuing a career in medicine. She’s here today to share her long and challenging journey to a diagnosis.
Kelly, thank you so much for joining us today. From the moment I met you, I knew that I wanted to have this conversation with you, so I am just so grateful to you for taking time out of your crazy life right now to chat with us.
Dr. Kelly Tyson:
Thank you so much for having me. Obviously, this journey’s been something we’ve been talking about for a long time and I kind of feel like it was fate that we met. Once we kind of get into it and start talking about doctors and common people we’ve really come into contact with throughout both of our journeys.
Kelly Cervantes:
I know, right? Why don’t you give us a little background about who you are and your life as it is now?
Dr. Kelly Tyson:
Yeah, so our life is chaotic. I think a lot of people can say that. Right now, their life is pretty chaotic. I am currently a resident physician in New York. I’m originally from Michigan, went to the University of Michigan. I describe a lot of who I am in education, so I have a master’s in global health and then have kind of lived in a bunch of places around the world, around the country. And then with my husband, we ended up in New York because he is a professional hockey player, so he was here in New York, but he was recently traded to the Anaheim Ducks from the New York Rangers so he’s now in California. I’m here in New York finishing up my last year of internal medicine residency with our 1-year-old son and our two lovely dogs. I’ll call them, lovely. That’s very kind of me, but life is chaotic, but that’s right now.
Kelly Cervantes:
I can understand pieces of that life very well of having a high profile husband whose job moves him around quite a bit, and the ways that that can affect the rest of the family is, I think, chaotic is the perfect way to describe that. Tell us about how epilepsy first entered your life. And I know from talking with you that it took a while for you to get a diagnosis, so perhaps the better way to ask the question is when, what you would later understand was epilepsy, when that first entered your life. Because for a long time, you didn’t know.
Dr. Kelly Tyson:
And I think that’s the case for a lot of people. This has been an education, especially over the past few years, but I was well into medicine when I found out. So really, epilepsy first entered my life, I was 16. We think it was around when I was 16. I had lots of deja vus prior to that, but really, the first episode I was, unfortunately, driving. I was in our neighborhood and I don’t really remember this episode very much, but my mom can tell me pretty vividly that I called her and I was like, “I’m in the neighborhood. I don’t feel right. I feel funny. I can’t drive.” And I had pulled over and I was just feeling very weird, very off, and I couldn’t really explain to her what I was feeling, but I just knew that I wasn’t really oriented. And that sort of passed. And then, I had several episodes, really, over, I think through the rest of high school where it would look like I was passing out. I was having strong deja vus.
This was never something that I was really associated with epilepsy, of course. And that was 16, my diagnosis didn’t come until I was 27 in my second year of medical school. So as you could see, there was a really, really big period of time where I had no idea what was going on and I was just-
Kelly Cervantes:
What were you told? I’m sure that your mom took you, you were 16, you’re a juvenile, I’m sure your mother took you to doctors. What kind of doctors did you see? What were you told?
Dr. Kelly Tyson:
So I first saw a cardiologist. When I was really young, I’d been seen by a pediatric cardiologists at the University of Michigan. So my mom brought me there and they said, “This is vasovagal syncope”, which is in medical terms, essentially what happens when you think of someone who sees blood and they pass out, blood pressure drops, you pass out, you come back. So they were saying, “Oh, really common. Young women, especially more common. You’re passing out.” I think at that point, I wasn’t even really able to articulate what was happening as people talk about their stereotypical episodes. At that point in time, I don’t think I could really tell you what that was, but things really escalated in college. And of course, stress, alcohol, other things going on.
Kelly Cervantes:
All of the regular experiences that an undergrad goes through.
Dr. Kelly Tyson:
Absolutely. All of them. All of that was happening and I started to have more of these sort of episodes and some would be late at night. I was out 2:00 in the morning, I would be with friends. And my mom started going through this process with me because the one thing that was really notable after I had these episodes was that I was exhausted. I would sleep for a day. Difficult to out of bed. I was sleeping for a really, really long time afterwards. But everyone’s like, “Oh yeah, you passed out, you’re tired.” So we kind of just went with that and thought that’s what was going on. And this is at the University of Michigan, an incredible health system. I had access to everything. I saw a cardiologist, I saw an internist, I saw a rheumatologist. I saw an endocrinologist for some things.
I was just kind of bounced around to everywhere until finally they said, “We’re going to send you to see a psychiatrist. We think that this is something psychiatric.” And my mom remembers this, I don’t. But she said, I very vividly remember saying, “What about seeing a neurologist?” Because my aunt has epilepsy or had epilepsy. So she had said that and they always sort of said, “No, no, no.” So for some reason that step was missed along my journey in college. I don’t know why. Thinking back now when someone passes out, you think seizure syncope. So I don’t really know, but that was something that was sort of like, “This is syncope or you’re having panic attacks.” And I kind of continued on with college and my friends would sort of know. And I think a lot of people who have been around people with seizures kind of know the look someone’s going to have. And my friends would have this look where they could look at me across from the bar and they could say, “She’s going to go down.”
They would see my face, and now they look back, they say, “Yes, you’d start staring off into space and you get a very glazed over look in your eyes”, like classic seizure look. But I think a lot of people who have gone through this journey, in hindsight, oh, hindsight is 20/20.
Kelly Cervantes:
Yes, absolutely. And when the average person thinks of a seizure, they’re thinking of a tonic clonic, grand mal, like that. They’re not thinking of focal seizures.
Dr. Kelly Tyson:
100%. So my seizures, and we can get into it later, are focal seizures. We’re kind of in this process now where am I having ones that are secondarily generalized? We’re kind of working through that. And the kicker here is one of my mentors and people who really was impactful, I think, in my journey in education was a neurosurgeon who did a lot of vagus nerve stimulators, did a lot of craniotomies in patients who had seizures, and I spent two summers with him in the hospital, in college, and not once… But those patients were significantly debilitated by their seizures. So that was what I saw. I was thinking tonic clonic, this big eventful seizure, I wasn’t thinking as much about the focal seizure side, nor did I really know much about it then.
Kelly Cervantes:
So often I ask people about any stigma that they may have experienced, but it’s a little tricky with you because you didn’t even know necessarily what stigma you would be afraid of. However, you are still having these fainting episodes. Your friends know what to look out for, so they’re aware of them, not as if you could hide them if you wanted to. But I sort of wonder how that impacted you both educationally, if you’re having these episodes and then you’re sleeping for a long time afterwards, how did that impact you educationally and socially?
Dr. Kelly Tyson:
I think the stigma part was really more definitely educational than it was social because my friends would be like, “Oh, Kelly passes out, it happens.” That is, we deal with it. She’s going to go down, just make sure you catch her. She’ll wake up and then she might be a little confused and then we’ll move on with the night. But I think educationally, it was a lot harder because I think some of the other comorbid things that I deal with really affected my ability to study. I struggled a lot my first year and really into my second year until I got it kind of figured out. And I think everyone just thought, “Oh, she went off to college and she’s having too much fun. Oh, she’s always so tired. She’s been out too much.” There’s so many other things to blame it on. And I think the stigma really came in, I don’t want to talk about it as much when I was sent to see psychiatry, which I know as a physician now, incredible resource and I’m sure at some point we talk about the comorbidities with anxiety disorders, depression and all of these things and people with epilepsy. But having ADHD anxiety, these things just affected what I needed to do to get to where I wanted to be.
Brandon:
Hi, this is Brandon from Cure Epilepsy. Have you or a loved one been recently diagnosed with epilepsy? Are you looking for more information about epilepsy and available treatment options? Go to cureepilepsy.org/for-patients to get resources and information about epilepsy. Now, back to Seizing Life.
Kelly Cervantes:
You graduate from University of Michigan and you went to Australia. Tell us about that, about how did your epilepsy affect you there? Did you learn anything else about it while you were there? How long were you in Australia?
Dr. Kelly Tyson:
I was there for about a year. I did my master’s degree there. I didn’t really learn anything else about the epilepsy there, but I was doing that. I was working two jobs in addition to that, and I was very tired. I was doing a lot, and whether it was that or me just kind of getting a little bit older, I started to have, I think, a little more intensity, more frequency to some things where I had quite a cluster of a lot of episodes and this wasn’t getting better. And in hindsight, going back to it now, it’s not like I passed out two times a year. I, at this point, had had probably 50 different times where I had had some sort of either just my head had fallen. And these are not my partial aware seizures, these are not my just auras. These are ones where I’d fully fallen, and that number is enormous now when I think about that. It was over the course of six, seven years, but that’s a little more significant.
Kelly Cervantes:
So you are in your early 20s, you’ve been dealing with these fainting episodes, 50 to 60 of them over the course of your life, which is wild. What is the turning point here?
Dr. Kelly Tyson:
The turning point came when I was in medical school. So I did my masters, I worked for a little bit, and then I got into medical school in Florida, which is close to where Jacob and I had a home. So it was great. I get to live at home and we know how important stability is, really, for people who have epilepsy. Routine, those things are really important. And when I was in medical school, things sort of went out of control my first year and the stress was severe. I was not sleeping much. I was very, very anxious. And you’re constantly being tested, there’s just a lot going on. So with that, my focal aware seizures got a lot more intense. So I would have very, very strong deja vus where I would know what’s going to happen next. I’ve lived these moments before in my head.
I know what’s going to happen next, but then the thing that would be happening next would be just horrible things. I would get a call that someone close to me died or I would get in a car accident or really distressing things would be what’s going to happen next in that deja vu. And I would get this very, very impending sense of doom. And I think I, at that point, had so many of the falling episodes that I could really recount everything that happens. So you go and tell a doctor, and I’m sitting there and I’m like, “So what happens to me is I get nauseous and then I’m on this roller coaster, and then it feels like my chest is going to disintegrate into thousands of tiny particles and it’s going to explode out of my chest and then it rushes over me and then I’m out. And sometimes, I can see, but then I can hear, but I can’t talk back, and then I come back and then I’m tired and I sleep for a day.”
When I say that, I didn’t know anything about the other part of seizure. So for me, I think I’m crazy and there’s that in your head you think, “What’s going on in my head? Is this real?” So I had a lot of those moments which were just difficult, lonely moments. But when they got stronger, actually, the turning point was a Washington Post article, of all things, not medical school, not me learning more about seizures, not anyone else. This is why I think advocacy is so important and talking about it is because you don’t know who that’s going to reach. So the Washington Post had some medical mystery going on. They have these people who have written up medical mysteries, and it was one about a nurse who had had seizures and she wasn’t diagnosed until her 50s. My mom sent me this article and she goes, “It kind of sounds like you.” And I read it and I was like, “I’m having seizures.” So it just clicked right then.
So get on the phone with my mentor and he said, “One, I can’t believe you haven’t told me about this. And two, I think you have temporal lobe epilepsy.” So he said, “You need to see someone that I know.” He’d known, it was a colleague, Dr. Andres Kanner down at the University of Miami because I was in Florida. So I made an appointment with him. I saw someone else first who started me on medication. I had short EEG, normal. MRI, normal. But he said, “It does sound like focal seizures, so let’s just try some medications.” So I started and once I got on something, things got a lot better in terms of the episodes. So medication was working. So that was the aha moment with someone saying, this sounds a lot like you, not me actually going to the doctor.
Kelly Cervantes:
Which really it does, it speaks so much to we don’t know what we don’t know, and getting that education out there.
Dr. Kelly Tyson:
I had access to everything. I had access to the information. I had parents in education, I had the financial resources. I had access to the best healthcare professionals in the country. I had access to all these things, and yet, I still didn’t have a diagnosis for, it was about 11 years and it wasn’t until things progressed. And I remember, I got in to see Dr. Kanner, and I kind of remember him saying something along the lines of, “I’m kind of surprised you made it here before you had a tonic clonic, or grand mal seizure. Because a lot of times, in young people, relatively high functioning things are misdiagnosed until there’s this big aha moment when you have a really, really big seizure and it’s just progressed. So I, gratefully, didn’t make it to that point, but I feel a lot of gratitude to whoever wrote that article. Thank you.
Kelly Cervantes:
So of course, I have to highlight Dr. Kanner, who has been on our podcast before. He is an incredible, incredible clinician. His episode was about the comorbidities between epilepsy and mental health, which you’ve really sort of spoken about on this episode. I can’t help but think you’re going through these 11 years where you don’t have a diagnosis. You have a misdiagnosis, and how much worse your mental health was because of all of that additional stress and anxiety of not knowing and not being able to control it. And it’s sort of an interesting thing to get the epilepsy diagnosis, which has this comorbidity, but I have to imagine that, in some ways, maybe that helps some of that anxiety and depression because for the first time you were seen and understood and you could see and understand.
Dr. Kelly Tyson:
Absolutely, and I can just… Also, Dr. Kanner, thank you for everything. I could tell him that a million times over. I remember the first time going into his office too, and he does a questionnaire when you walk in, the GAD-Seven, which just is a screening questionnaire for generalized anxiety disorder. And he did that and we sat there and I remember answering it, people are really pretty honest on these. And he said, “You have an anxiety disorder, as well. Do you want something for that?” In the beginning, I think I was a little hesitant, but I think, one, in the educational part and just me trying to become a physician and all of that entails, there was validity in me to be able to say, this is what’s happening to me. Some validity in knowing that I’m not just making it up. And as I said, there’s just a lot of lonely moments.
The anxiety disorder, it’s not just the anxiety of when I have a diagnosis, but I have an anxiety disorder. Gratefully, I don’t have a major depressive disorder, which a lot of people do are associated with. But I was a clear generalized anxiety disorder, which actually made it really difficult to function. And both I had anxiety, which works in part of my auras, some of the seizures, it’s just like over-excitability, this intense anxiety, this buzzing, constant buzzing feeling. And then there was just the underlying anxiety disorder. And I remember finally coming back and being like, “Help me.” And he did. And I have been on medication for that since and changed my life. Absolutely changed my life in every way, maybe more than getting seizures under control, honestly. And knowing that, one, that’s okay. And two, how common it is.
Kelly Cervantes:
Absolutely. I want to get into a bit of what your treatment journey has been like. Now you have this diagnosis, you know that you have this specific kind of epilepsy. You’re being treated for that, you’re being treated for the anxiety. Was Dr. Kanner or any doctor since then able to figure out the origin? I know you mentioned that your aunt had epilepsy. Was there a genetic cause?
Dr. Kelly Tyson:
We did a few things. We did the genetic testing. I have three genes that were of undetermined significance that they’ve seen. So nothing specific, but there’s that. And then there’s a great aunt in my family who I guess also had epilepsy, so there is something there. But I think, one, in terms of the medications, I was on Lamictal at first, which I really was hoping that would work best for me. But I ended up, I think 12, 14 days, I ended up having an allergic reaction and you don’t mess around with allergic reactions to Lamictal. So off of that. Switched me over to Oxcarbazepine or Trileptil and I was on that for maybe a year, much better controlled, so much better, but I felt very foggy. It slowed me down. It made it hard to study, very, very hard to focus. So I was working with Dr. Kanner and optimizing medications there because I was like, I need to study literally all day. It is my job right now to study.
And I just felt like there was a disconnect between me and the world on that. But I was better controlled, so we just kept going until I started to not do as well. And I started to have some more symptoms. So he said, “Let’s do an ambulatory EEG.” Like, let’s do an EEG at home. So I drove home, I drove down in my scrubs after one day clinic, put the electrodes on, and I actually stayed home instead of being in my full environment, I was home studying on a weekend. And we got the results back. It was a tele-visit and I remember this and he said, “So you have epilepsy. You have it.” And I go, “It’s real? And he goes, “It’s real.” And I just started crying because it had been that much time. I think even in having it, even in being on medications, even seeing a neurologist, there’s a part of me that’s saying, “Is it real?”
And I constantly, I was always like, “Is it real? Is it made up? Is it just associated with anxiety? What is it?” So there were two areas in my left temporal lobe that do have hyper-excitability. One, I think, is anterior temporal lobe, one’s posterior temporal parietal, for all the medical people out there. There’s two areas that like to, they’re a little hyper-excitable. So found that out. Kind of stayed the course on medication until 10 days before my board exams when my body just said, nah, I’m going to have a big breakthrough seizure. And I just got home from clinic and I’m sitting there and I was like, “I’m going to go take a shower.” And my husband was there and I just sat down and I was like, “I don’t feel well.” And then I started to have this thing and then the whole sequence of things started to happen. I was like, “I’m going to have a seizure.”
Most intense I’d had, I think I was not actually responding to anything for 30 seconds to a minute. Afterwards, my husband was like, “I was really unable to arouse you for four hours. You were really just asleep.” But he had contacted Dr. Kanner and everything was kind of under control. He just said, “Increase medications now.” And sorry, Dr. Kanner, I did not do so because I knew going up on medications 10 days before boards would’ve been terrible. I even talked to my mentor, he’s like, “You need to do it.” And I didn’t do it, but they didn’t go great anyway, so that is what it is. But that next month was really, really terrible. I started having more and more of the full seizure. So actually since being on medication, I hadn’t had any where I had fallen, lost home, nothing. I’d only had a few auras since I’d been on medication.
So now we’re into 2020. In that fall was when I had that big breakthrough and the three weeks following that were horrible. They kept happening pretty, every few days until he said, “We need to bring you to the hospital for inpatient to the epilepsy monitoring unit.” Part of me was like, “I do not want to sit in the hospital in Florida in the middle of the pandemic.” And my husband was playing for the New York Rangers at the time. I knew that I needed to have a neurologist here. So Dr. Kanner got me in touch with my, now epileptologist, Dr. Ruben Kuzniecky, who’s a close friend and they are just brilliant, brilliant minds. And I was admitted to the hospital here for a week and just taken off of medications. That was sort of the start of, I think, probably three really, really hard months in my life. My brain took a vacation when I was in there. I had no seizures while I was inpatient. Just taken off medication.
Kelly Cervantes:
That’s how it always goes. When you want to have them, you never have them. Tale [inaudible 00:26:17] epilepsy monitoring unit time.
Dr. Kelly Tyson:
They told me that in the hospital, but I was like, “Is that true? Does that happen?”
Kelly Cervantes:
That’s so true. So true.
Dr. Kelly Tyson:
It was on vacation. It was like, “I’m cool, I’m safe, I’m good.” So I didn’t have that. But we switched medications afterwards. So I was switched over to Keppra and the kepp rage was real.
Kelly Cervantes:
It could be a really, really tough med. It’s a miracle drug for some people and for others, not so much.
Dr. Kelly Tyson:
And I struggled with it. And I know if you have mood disorders, it’s not always what you want to go to first, if you have [inaudible 00:26:51] close follow-up. But that was where we were at. So I was on a combination of that and oxcarbazepine. So I was on the long-acting Oxtellar. I did better with the extended releases. Oxcarbazepine is also a mood stabilizer, so whether it was withdrawal from that or starting the Keppra, I had my one and only ever major depressive episode. That was just a really dark, dark time. And this is now in my fourth year of medical school and I’m still going through things, but everyone else was applying to residency and I could not. I was just too sick, too in the thick of things, medications, uncertainty, will I get better? What’s going to happen? It was just a very, very bad few months, but we, once again, tweaked things around and I got back and I’ve been doing quite well since then.
Kelly Cervantes:
So Kelly, it has been a journey. Even once you got the epilepsy diagnosis, it is a journey, and I think this is true for most epilepsy patients, to find the right med, the one with the side effects that you can tolerate the best, that impact your life the least, and all of that is sort of, it’s going to change over time because your body acclimates to a med, all of these things. How are you doing today? How is your epilepsy controlled today?
Dr. Kelly Tyson:
That is such a great question and when I first met you, I probably had a different answer for that than I do today because it is a journey, and I always say it that way to everyone that I speak to because it changes and life changes and circumstances change. So I actually was great for most of residency. I only had maybe, I think I had one my first year not even losing tone, just like a focal aware. I have auras. I have auras, but that was the extent of anything. And I went through having a baby and it was great, mostly, until actually end of last July, which was my first real big breakthrough that I had. I, unfortunately, was at the hospital when it happened.
I’m still kind of dealing with that one, mentally, but there were some circumstances about me maybe decreasing my dose too soon after having a baby. So we increased the dose again and I’ve been pretty good, but I have had, I think, more frequent auras than I did even a few years ago. So we’re kind of in the process of revisiting what’s going on, and that’s why I say it’s fluid. When I first met you, I was doing great. I was like, “Things are fantastic.” But whether there’s going to be some medication changes, I think that remains to be seen, unfortunately.
Kelly Cervantes:
I’m sorry, it sucks. It’s a really, really crappy thing to work through and to have other people understand because I think most people, they hear epilepsy and they’re like, “Oh, you can just take a drug and it’s going to be fine.” And not understanding how complicated it is, and so I appreciate your honesty so much. I know that you are done with residency in just five months, that is so exciting. So what is next for you in the family?
Dr. Kelly Tyson:
So we are New York based now. We’re originally Midwesterners, but my husband will be finishing up his season in California now instead of here in New York. Have a lot of love for our people here, but we are excited for our next adventure in California. So we’re going to keep New York as kind of home-based, but moving out in the end of August out to the west coast. But we plan to kind of stay really involved here in the community in New York.
Kelly Cervantes:
I am just so grateful for your openness and your honesty on this journey, because people need to hear it, people need to understand. And I think your experience is going to give a lot of hope to people who are navigating their own diagnostic odysseys and their own treatment journeys with different medications. And seeing all that you’ve accomplished and been able to do despite all of these challenges is really remarkable. And I’m very proud to know you, friend.
Dr. Kelly Tyson:
Thank you. I just feel like it was a perfect time to meet you, and I was kind of thinking, I was like, if I could say one thing, if I could impart any wisdom of this journey, and then I am sitting there and I’m like, there isn’t anything great to say because at the end of the day, it sucks. I think the biggest thing for me was just hearing the journey that other people had, hearing the symptoms and knowing that I’m not alone. They feel what I feel. There are people who experience it. It is real. And I think just the more you hear about these journeys and the more people talk about them, really, the better off we are in terms of community and, hopefully, research and getting everyone to a better place. I’m very grateful to the epilepsy community and thank you for having me. Yes, the beginning of our friendship.
Kelly Cervantes:
Thank you so much, Kelly.
Dr. Kelly Tyson:
Thanks.
Kelly Cervantes:
Thank you, Kelly for sharing your journey to diagnosis and congratulations on your upcoming completion of your residency. Kelly’s story is a reminder of the challenges faced by too many people in obtaining a proper epilepsy diagnosis and treatment. Cure Epilepsy knows that an accurate diagnosis and proper treatment are the keys to attaining the best quality of life for those living with epilepsy. That’s why we fund breakthrough research that will transform the lives of people with epilepsy. If you would like to support our research initiatives, please visit cureepilepsy.org/donate. Thank you.
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The opinions expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect the views of Cure Epilepsy. The information contained herein is provided for general information only and does not offer medical advice or recommendations. Individuals should not rely on this information as a substitute for consultations with qualified healthcare professionals who are familiar with individual medical conditions and needs. Cure Epilepsy strongly recommends that care and treatment decisions related to epilepsy and any other medical conditions be made in consultation with a patient’s physician or other qualified healthcare professionals who are familiar with the individual’s specific health situation.