When a young child has a seizure, the parents are understandably frightened. They may bring the youngster to an emergency room, an urgent care clinic, or to a Family Medical Center in Wichita Kansas if the child can be seen quickly. Depending on the circumstances, a doctor may suspect the child has epilepsy, since this is a relatively common disorder. About one in 100 people have the chronic seizure condition that usually can be controlled with medication. Epilepsy involves abnormal electrical discharges by brain cells or many more of those discharges than is normal.
A doctor with a Family Medical Center in Wichita Kansas coordinates specialty care with a neurologist, so the young patient receives a definitive diagnosis and treatment recommendations from an expert in brain disorders. Diagnostic tools will include an electroencephalogram (EEG) and blood tests. The neurologist may also want the patient to undergo magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
The family doctor at a clinic such as Wichita Family Medicine Specialists LLC becomes an integral part of the patient’s ongoing care. The initial stages of the diagnostic procedures and treatment adjustments can be troubling for the entire family, but most kids and adults with epilepsy live completely normal lives without experiencing future seizures once a medication regimen is in place and its positive effects have been established. At that point, the child essentially becomes a more routine patient of a family doctor once more.
The doctor will want to see the child and parents regularly to learn how well the medicine is working and whether it produces ongoing unpleasant side effects. Usually, the prescription is started at a low dosage and that dosage is gradually increased until it effectively stops seizures from occurring. Each individual reacts differently to specific types of medicine, and some respond better to a certain drug than others do. Many different kinds of medication effectively treat epilepsy, so nobody has to put up with side effects. A common early side effect is slight drowsiness; since the drugs have sedating effects that calm the brain’s electrical activity. Eventually, patients adjust to the drug’s effects and no longer feel drowsy when taking medication.
