[catblast01]

“ People who experience a single random seizure, for instance, are 50 times more likely to become epileptic than someone who has never had one.1 Like Philip’s raven, the same stimuli that preceded the first fit—such as anxiety or a particular musical passage—more readily trigger future episodes. And the more often seizures occur, the stronger and more pervasive the underlying neural network may become, potentially inducing more widespread or more violent attacks.”

This article is a dumpster fire, and based on fundamentally obsolete and harmful beliefs. Yes people that ever have a seizure are more likely to have epilepsy. This says nothing about why, and what follows is all poorly or non researched editorializing. None of what is said here has even weak evidence. Seizures are an objective physiologic phenomenon we can measure. While there are a wide variety of non-specific predispositions to an episode including stress, no one has the authority to claim the above. Furthermore a large class of epileptic seizures are provoked by imageable, physical brain damage and another large portion have no provocation, this isn’t some middle school angst. It also seems to riff off the obsolete notion that epilepsy was mostly due to mental illness/craziness back when those were equivocated.

[ampdepolymerase]

You should not jump to conclusions, the author literally won a prize for that specific research proposal.

https://grad.berkeley.edu/news/headlines/honors-awards/clanc...

[solumos]

The idea that medicine is an objective science that we've fully "solved" is much more harmful.

There are a number of symptoms that we can group into "conditions," yet have a murky etiology.

That's not to say there isn't snake oil out there. There's certainly a ton of that as well. But medical problems aren't always a simple "solve for x" - there is a TON that we still don't know about how the human body works.

[deregulateMed]

I would love a science based alternative to our current Authority based healthcare system. Cheaper, potentially better outcomes, less errors.

That said, the physician cartel would never let it happen.

[drdeca]

I don’t understand what point you are making by saying that seizures are an objectively measurable thing.

Are you suggesting “and therefore it can’t be influenced by the specific thoughts a person has”?

I don’t see a reason that something which we (at least so far) can’t objectively measure, but which the patient can report on, couldn’t have an impact on something which we can objectively measure.

I also don’t understand what you are talking about when you mention middle school angst?

It seems like you have the impression that the article is blaming people for having seizures or something like that? But that isn’t at all the impression I get from it.

[tw04]

His entire point seems very narrow minded. We could fill a dictionary full of all the measurable medical issues that stress can cause. We know that things like a smell can trigger memories in the brain completely involuntarily. So to act as if a memory of something that was happening during a previous seizure couldn't be a catalyst for a future one seems naive to me.