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When describing your seizures to your doctor...
Sat, 09/29/2007 - 13:16Do use more technical terms, describing them as absence, tonic-clonic, etc and so forth seizures, or do you just try and describe them or give the description other people have given you, "You looked like a fish out of water flopping all over the place", and hope that's given them a clue?
Personally I'm thinking of cornering my neurologist and telling him my understanding of each type of seizures and what I think mine are, I'm tired of sounding idiotic while trying to describe these things, esp. since they're showing more and more of a pattern that makes me think the absence and partial seizures were never controlled to begin with and they're triggering secondary generalized seizures, rather than starting out as tonic-clonics to begin with, but I have had doctors in other specialties not appreciate it when patients use technical terms.
So, how do you talk to your neurologist?
Comments
Re: When describing your seizures to your doctor...
Submitted by ShortCircuit on Wed, 2007-10-31 - 15:08
I'm lucky if he'll give me that much time. I'm usually in and out of there in five minutes. He rarely gives me an opportunity to talk. I've found this problem with other doctors. Very frustrating.
Re: When describing your seizures to your doctor...
Submitted by Eternal howl on Thu, 2007-11-01 - 03:06
I use both technical and terminologies to describe what it feels like (you know, windows shut down, brain fart etc). My neurologist is excellent. He's ALWAYS listened, never tried to pull his "I'm the specialist" attitude with me and he's just generally been good. I've only seen him about 3-4 times over the course of my epilepsy history which is about 22 years, but if anyone was in my neck of the woods, I would highly recommend him.
I think he appreciates me taking the time to research my condition - makes his job easier. Such as when I was looking for a new AED to try, I scoured the web for ages and came up with some possibles but also listed some "definitely nots" and advised why I did not wish to try them. This guy is probably in his 70's now. To my knowledge there are only a couple of them in the city and the other one I've heard of isn't that nice - treats people like idiots.
Patients should take the time to research their own conditions and possible drug treatments. It's your body and as far as I'm concerned, you have to live with it, the doctors don't.
Re: Re: When describing your seizures to your doctor...
Submitted by xgi on Mon, 2007-10-29 - 08:38
IMO it depends on your doc. My old doc was a butthead firstclass and he was use all the medical jargon on me like I had a medical degree. My new neruo is super. He likes my term " brain fart". Personally I wouldn't put up with a pissy doc myself. you're the patient and if he's rude fine i'll get another doctor as I did in my case. Good luck to all and God bless.x