Epilepsy's Alternative Health Options

Living Naturally

10/15/2006 06:30 PM

Courtesy of Alternative Medicine http://www.alternativemedicine.com

Heal Thyself—Spotlight on Epilepsy By Wendy Meyeroff Donna Andrews was an 18-year-old college freshman the day her life twisted out of control. “It was St. Patrick’s Day, March 17,” she says. “I’d been feeling weak and exhausted all morning, and I thought I had the flu.” Beyond that, her memories of the day are blurry. She knows that she fell, and vaguely remembers “being jostled around by paramedics.” Then she slipped into a coma and stayed there for six weeks. When she awoke, doctors said she had been ill with viral encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain that left her with damaged neural pathways. “It was as if I had holes in my brain,” she says. An enormous chunk of her memory (including her ability to read and write) was gone, and she’d developed epilepsy, experiencing up to ten seizures a day. Her doctors doubted she could make a full recovery. And indeed, after nearly two years, she’d regained only about 40 percent of the abilities she’d lost. She couldn’t even leave the house alone, in case a seizure struck. Still, her neurologist said there was nothing else to be done. Fast-forward to today. Believe it or not, it’s been more than three decades since Andrews’s last seizure. During that time, she was able to earn not only her college degree, but also a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. Along with Joel Reiter, a Harvard-trained neurologist, she directs the Andrews-Reiter Epilepsy Research Program in Santa Rosa, California, where she works to help other epilepsy sufferers like herself. Most people who control their epilepsy do so with medication, but the key to Andrews’s recovery was quite different. Two years after her diagnosis, she realized that her seizures came in response to certain stressful triggers. So she decided to change the way she responded to stress, in the hope that she’d be better able to manage her disease. As she learned to unhook from stress—taking breaks when she felt her frustration level mounting, for instance, or breathing slowly and deeply—the frequency of her seizures diminished. Seven years after she developed epilepsy, doctors took her off all her medications. That was back in the 1970s, when nondrug treatments for epilepsy were almost unheard of. But these days, people with epilepsy—often with the blessing of their physicians—are increasingly turning to alternative therapies to help themselves lead more normal lives, by reducing both the frequency of their seizures and the amount of medication they take. “We’ve come a long way in a generation,” says Jeffrey Cohen, a physician who is director of the adult epilepsy program at New York’s Beth Israel Medical Center. For the 2.5 million Americans who suffer from the disorder, the shift is a welcome one. Most standard anti-seizure drugs bring numerous troublesome side effects, including grogginess, balance problems, and the potential for long-term liver damage. As Andrews discovered, getting stress under control is a crucial element for patients who hope to reduce their dependence on these drugs. “We have numerous studies in which stress is cited as the leading cause of seizures,” says Steven Pacia, a neurologist at New York University’s Comprehensive Epilepsy Center. “Patients say, ‘I was seizure-free for three months; then my boss yelled at me and I had a cluster of seizures.’” http://www.alternativemedicine.com/common/news/printable.asp?tas…ews&SID_store_news=666&storeID=02AD61F001A74B5887D3BD11F6C28169

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