Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Preparing for your appointment
By Mayo Clinic staffYou're likely to start by first seeing your family doctor or a general practitioner. However, you'll probably be referred to a doctor who specializes in nervous system disorders (neurologist).
Because appointments can be brief, and there's often a lot of ground to cover, it's a good idea to be well prepared for your appointment. Here's some information to help you get ready for your appointment, and what to expect from your doctor.
What you can do
- Write down any symptoms you or your child has experienced, including any that may seem unrelated to the reason for which you scheduled the appointment.
- Make a list of all medications, as well as any vitamins or supplements, that you or your child is taking and the dosages used. Write down the reasons any were discontinued, whether this was because of side effects or lack of effectiveness.
- Ask a family member to come with you to the doctor, because it's not always easy to remember everything you've been told during your appointment. Also, since memory loss can happen during seizures, many times an observer is able to better describe the seizures than the person who's had the seizure.
- Write down questions to ask your doctor.
Your time with your doctor is limited, so preparing a list of questions ahead of time will help you make the most of your time. List your questions from most important to least important in case time runs out. For temporal seizure, some basic questions to ask your doctor include:
- Is the diagnosis epilepsy?
- Will more seizures occur? Will different types of seizures occur?
- What kinds of tests are needed? Do these tests require any special preparation?
- What treatments are available, and which do you recommend?
- What types of side effects can I expect from treatment?
- Are there any alternatives to the primary approach that you're suggesting?
- Are there any activity restrictions that need to be followed?
- Is there a generic alternative to the medicine you're prescribing?
- Are there any brochures or other printed material that I can take home with me? What Web sites do you recommend?
In addition to the questions that you've prepared to ask your doctor, don't hesitate to ask questions during your appointment at any time that you don't understand something.
What to expect from your doctor
Your doctor is likely to ask you a number of questions. Being ready to answer them may reserve time to go over any points you want to spend more time on. Your doctor may ask:
- When did you or your child first begin experiencing symptoms?
- Did you notice any unusual sensations prior to the seizure?
- How often do the seizures occur?
- Can you describe a typical seizure?
- How long do the seizures last?
- Do the seizures occur in clusters?
- Do they all look the same or are there different seizure behaviors you or others have seen?
- What medications have you or your child tried? What doses were used?
- Have you tried any medication combinations?
- Have you noticed any seizure triggers, such as sleep deprivation or illness?
- Temporal lobe epilepsy. Epilepsy Foundation. http://www.epilepsyfoundation.org/about/types/syndromes/temporallobe.cfm. Accessed May 7, 2009.
- Stafstrom CE, et al. Pathophysiology of seizures and epilepsy. http://www.uptodate.com/index/home.html. Accessed April 17, 2009.
- Foldvary-Schaefer N, et al. Epilepsy and epilepsy syndromes. In: Goetz, CG. Textbook of Clinical Neurology. 3rd ed. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders Elsevier: 2007. http://www.mdconsult.com/das/book/body/136248193-3/0/1488/441.html?tocnode=53805069&fromURL=441.html#4-u1.0-B978-1-4160-3618-0..10052-9_4538. Accessed May 8, 2009.
- Seizures and epilepsy: Hope through research. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/epilepsy/detail_epilepsy.htm?css=print. Accessed April 24, 2009.
- Ropper AH, et al. Epilepsy and other seizure disorders. In: Ropper AH, et al. Adams and Victor's Principles of Neurology. 9th ed. New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill Medical; 2009. http://www.accessmedicine.com/content.aspx?aID=3632229. Accessed April 22, 2009.
- Seizure disorders. The Merck Manuals: The Merck Manual for Healthcare Professionals. http://www.merck.com/mmpe/print/sec16/ch214/ch214a.html. April 26, 2009.
- Schuele SU, et al. Intractable epilepsy: Management and therapeutic alternatives. Lancet Neurology. 2008;7:514.
- Spooner CG, et al. New-onset temporal lobe epilepsy in children. Neurology. 2006;67:2147.
- Practice parameter update: Management issues for women with epilepsy-focus on pregnancy (an evidence based review): Teratogenesis and perinatal outcomes. St. Paul, Minn.: American Academy of Neurology. http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/WNL.0b013e3181a6b312v1. Accessed April 27, 2009.
- Britton JW (expert opinion). Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. May 14, 2009.
