Why Start a Blog on Epilepsy?

Welcome to the "Epilepsy in a Nutshell" blog!

Why start a blog on Epilepsy? The answer is fairly simple. We are entering a new age in health care where patients (and family/friends of patients) want to empower themselves with information. The flow of knowledge from clinical and basic science realms- especially as it pertains to epilepsy- is not readily accessible. Therefore, the purpose of this blog is to distill and relay important information to those of you living with epilepsy.

The title "Epilepsy in a Nutshell" harkens back to my grade 9 science class where my teacher used to tell us "it's all up there in a nutshell grade 9". This was his way of empowering us to use our brains and sort through the problems. The title isn't meant to suggest that epilepsy is a simple subject. On the contrary- there is nothing more challenging than trying to understand how the brain works, or why it isn't working the way we want it to. As you probably already know, there are no easy answers in this field. Fundamental questions like "what is a seizure", "who gets epilepsy" and "what is the best treatment for my seizures" are still being debated. Regardless, I will address all of these questions here and together we can try and make sense of it all.

I will make a few blog posts today, just to populate the blog. My goal is to make one or two posts each week. Inevitably, I will post information on "what is epilepsy", etc. But, there are many sites out there already dealing with that (see links). My vision for this site is to address issues facing those living with epilepsy.

Well, I hope you find the information posted here useful. Please feel free to comment below or email me if you want me to review a specific topic. I will do my best to cover many of the relevant topics facing those living with epilepsy. To keep things exciting, I will also call on colleagues and mentors from time-to-time to post the "latest and greatest" in their subfield of epilepsy research.

So here we go ...