I read a recent article (2016) ,this one on Medscape and have come to the conclusion that a lot of doctors (obviously not all) and people really do not give a shit. They just enjoy experiments, which is good and bad and frustrating. I also tried to find a 2017 one, after all this was made in January of 2016. Nada, no updates. By the way, I was rudely awoken this morning and the past two mornings by a jack hammer outside my door extra early plus this morning extra nauseous. I am not starting this off on a good note, and this day sucks. Bear with me. And in the end, this is just a rant.

In this article they covered “5 Hot Topics in Epilepsy Care” ooo aaaa.

The first, from my perspective being the dumbest. The interchangeability of lamotrigine and Lamictal and how surprising that finding was. They are nearly chemically identical, duh. I am biased and also allergic to this med so a natural hate kind of washes over me when I hear about it. I’ve also heard (from a couple of my doctors now) it isn’t tolerated well by a lot of people even though it is one of the most commonly prescribed AEDs.

The second was some crazy stuff I have never heard of which is autoimmune epilepsy. WTF is that? Why is that a thing and not mentioned anywhere? Read this one.

Number 3, is ok. Pretty cool,  but not awesome. They are after 10 years of being on the market updating VNS devices so they can pick up an accelerated heart rate which they believe can be a warning sign of a seizure. I feel like this is where technology was around 5 years ago, and why aren’t there more advances in this? Why has the development on this taken 10 years for one extra thing?

4. What happened? An advanced surgical robot that increases accuracy in less invasive cranial surgeries, awesome. It started out as something interesting, and then morphed into a James Bond reference.

And the load of crap that is number 5. This doctor decided to announce that her “trial” with medical marijuana was messed up because it wasn’t a proper randomized study. WHAT WAS THE POINT? The people who came purposely to get the medical marijuana treatment, essentially, were so into it they had a positive placebo effect 2x that of everyone else. It was all in their heads. We know that medical marijuana is helpful and for some people the only drug they need for seizures. But it hasn’t been proven yet, and we have doctors just messing about taking their sweet ass time on 100 people who know what they’re getting with no real controlled clinical data. There was serious potential. They didn’t utilize it.

I get it, epilepsy isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. But this is sad. The only hot topic is medical marijuana and they messed that up royally. I hope they are actually moving forward with proper studies that will benefit us.