When The Brain Goes Wrong
Epilepsy surgery spreads across UK
Can you imagine having to knock out your own child in case their recurrent epilepsy seizures last so long that they might hurt themselves? Epilepsy is often intractable to drug therapy and in the past only specialist hospitals like Great Ormond Street could provide the surgery that eliminates epilepsy at it’s cause. Shortly this treatment, [...]
Epileptic Seizure or Demonic Possession? by Dr Jack
Monsters and Demons (Ch4) investigates our ancestors’ supernatural beliefs and asks whether modern science has better explainations. In episode 2 (Sat 3rd Dec 2011) Tony Robinson and I discussed how, in times before modern medical knowledge had figured out the facts and made them broadly available to all, certain forms of epileptic seizure could easily have been mistakenly attributed to evil spirits. In particular, temporal lobe epilepsy (these days better known as complex partial seizure disorder) can trigger vivid and sometimes deeply distressing hallucinations, whilst tonic-clonic seizures lead to grotesque-looking bodily contortions that, in times of old, could easily have been misunderstood and attributed to possession by malevolent spirits.
The Future of Schizophrenia by Dr Jack Lewis
Positive symptoms are usually reliably controlled in most schizophrenic people (assuming they can tolerate the side effects) using clozapine – an anti-psychotic medications that works in mysterious ways and even in most patients for whom the many other available drugs aren’t effective. With psychosis successfully supressed by such drug therapy, it is the negative symptoms and cognitive dysfunction that are by far the most severe impediment to a schizophrenic individual being well integrated into society and able to live a relatively normal, independent life. The biggest hope for an effective therapy in the coming few decades stems from a combination of 1) drugs that increase brain plasticity and 2) cognitive training, which together might help schizophrenic people to develop a whole host of social skills and basic mental processes that have become compromised during disease progression.
A Brief Overview of Acute versus Chronic Pain by Dr Jack Lewis
Chronic pain is a very broad subject so this is NOT a comprehensive review. Rather I’ve tried to create a brief and accessible overview that might help people understand some of the basic principles of acute and chronic pain to arm them during further exploration of the subject.
Ischaemic versus haemorrhagic stroke
This article explains the basic difference between stroke versus haemmorhage. Many different types of disability can result when the blood supply is interrupted according to which brain areas are damaged. It is almost always possible to regain some if not all of the lost functions by training intact brain areas to take over from damaged regions through absolute dedication to hours and hours of rehabilitation exercises.
