CARL W. BAZIL, MD, PhD: The medications that we use are all insome sort of pill or capsule, oral form. At least, for the outpatient. In the hospital and so forth, we sometimes use intravenous drugs. But what we're really talking about is pills and oral medications.
DAVID FOLK THOMAS: Sue, how do you know, if you have a seizure,how does the doctor begin to figure out what you have and what you need?
SUSAN T. HERMAN, MD: The first thing we need to do is get a gooddescription of what happened, from the patient or from somebody who sawthe seizure. That helps us to decide what kind of seizure it wasand whether or not it actually was a seizure. There are many otherthings that can sometimes be confused with seizures.
But once we've decided that it is a seizure, then we would do someother testing to determine what kind of seizure it is. We can doan electroencephalogram, which is a test of the brain wave activity. We can do a CAT scan or an MRI of the brain to look and see if there'sany abnormalities, if the person had had a stroke before or head trauma,to get a better idea of what kind of seizure they have and what their riskof having another seizure is.
DAVID FOLK THOMAS: If, say, somebody has had a seizure, or they'rediagnosed with epilepsy, give us examples, then, of what some of the diagnosesmight be, and then what the treatments would be.
