If TL;DR - can meditation reduce seizures in patients with epilepsy?
Greetings to all,
I'm curious to hear the thoughts from any practicing neurologists on the relationship between stress and epilepsy. According to the papers I've come across when casually browsing the topic, "stress" is the number one factor that people with epilepsy claim to cause their seizures. However, as one could imagine this is vague and subjective and therefore difficult to study. Does anyone have any interesting anecdotes where a patient eventually got their seizures under better control by incorporating some kind of effective stress management?
One method of stress reduction toward which I am particularly biased is meditation. I'll spare the details, but once upon a time I decided between either entering an order of monks or going to medical school. I chose the latter. That said, I am always curious to hear of any practical health benefits of learning and practicing some form of meditation.
An interesting article I found introduced to me the idea of "self-control" of seizures. The authors do briefly mention meditation - but one thing we have learned over the decades is that essentially the better one is at meditation, the slower and more synchronized his or her brain waves can become. As far as epilepsy is concerned, I am wondering if there might be some sort of "rewiring" process that occurs that may contribute to seizure reduction. But unraveling the exact mechanism is probably beyond my pay grade, and I'd be happy to hear anyone smarter than I am chime in on this one.
http://www.epilepsybehavior.com/article/S1525-5050(15)00678-2/abstract
A relatively humorous anecdote of my own is that I once met a patient diagnosed with epilepsy who ended up smoking a ton of pot and learned to "meditate" by default.
Whether it was his pharmacological medication, self-"medication", generalized stress relief, or a combination of these we may never know. But he subsequently became seizure-free for years and eventually his anti-epileptic medicines were discontinued (except maybe his herbal remedies).
On a more serious note, if there is indeed something to meditation and seizure reduction, perhaps a method of meditation/stress relief geared specifically toward patients with epilepsy could be developed and schematized to add to an existing regimen. I have a few theories on how to go about this that I contemplate in my spare time because I'm a nerd like that, but I am not a neurologist so my insight is somewhat limited. One of you brilliant neurologists out there might already be working on something like this. If so, feel free to send me a private note as well.
Cheers!
Greetings to all,
I'm curious to hear the thoughts from any practicing neurologists on the relationship between stress and epilepsy. According to the papers I've come across when casually browsing the topic, "stress" is the number one factor that people with epilepsy claim to cause their seizures. However, as one could imagine this is vague and subjective and therefore difficult to study. Does anyone have any interesting anecdotes where a patient eventually got their seizures under better control by incorporating some kind of effective stress management?
One method of stress reduction toward which I am particularly biased is meditation. I'll spare the details, but once upon a time I decided between either entering an order of monks or going to medical school. I chose the latter. That said, I am always curious to hear of any practical health benefits of learning and practicing some form of meditation.
An interesting article I found introduced to me the idea of "self-control" of seizures. The authors do briefly mention meditation - but one thing we have learned over the decades is that essentially the better one is at meditation, the slower and more synchronized his or her brain waves can become. As far as epilepsy is concerned, I am wondering if there might be some sort of "rewiring" process that occurs that may contribute to seizure reduction. But unraveling the exact mechanism is probably beyond my pay grade, and I'd be happy to hear anyone smarter than I am chime in on this one.
http://www.epilepsybehavior.com/article/S1525-5050(15)00678-2/abstract
A relatively humorous anecdote of my own is that I once met a patient diagnosed with epilepsy who ended up smoking a ton of pot and learned to "meditate" by default.
Whether it was his pharmacological medication, self-"medication", generalized stress relief, or a combination of these we may never know. But he subsequently became seizure-free for years and eventually his anti-epileptic medicines were discontinued (except maybe his herbal remedies).
On a more serious note, if there is indeed something to meditation and seizure reduction, perhaps a method of meditation/stress relief geared specifically toward patients with epilepsy could be developed and schematized to add to an existing regimen. I have a few theories on how to go about this that I contemplate in my spare time because I'm a nerd like that, but I am not a neurologist so my insight is somewhat limited. One of you brilliant neurologists out there might already be working on something like this. If so, feel free to send me a private note as well.
Cheers!
