There are few things more distressing that the sight of a child having a seizure–the body becomes stiff, the eyes roll on the head, he may foam at the mouth, he may empty his bladder and bowel, he may make strange sounds.
People have been having seizures for as long as there have been people.
The living creatures of this earth have been having seizures for as long as there have been living creatures.
We could, in fact, say where there is life there are seizures.
The potential to have a seizure exists in every living thing.
Anyone can have a seizure.
If one gets a high enough temperature the chance of having a seizure is very high. It is not uncommon for young children to have a seizure after having an inoculation. If one climbs to a high enough altitude one has a chance of having a seizure. There are many medications which can cause seizures (ironically among them are a number of anti-convulsants). Nutritional deficiencies can cause seizures. NASA has demonstrated that it can produce seizures in astronauts with 100% reliability in an environment of significantly increased gravity.
Where there is life there are seizures.
For as long as anyone can remember Man has feared and dreaded seizures. While we have shed our medieval notion that seizures are the work of the devil or a sign of evil, we continue to harbor a deep fear of this natural phenomenon.
Hippocrates appears to have been one of the first to take a closer look at the seizure. He was curious about seizures rather than afraid of them. He asked for anyone having a seizure to be brought to him immediately. He would open up these people and literally look at the brain to see what were the differences in the seizuring brain and the well brain. He made the observation that "If the brain be moist then seizures will be more likely."
Surely this must be the earliest known data concerning the significance of liquid balance in the occurrence of seizures.
In this century it was Dr. Temple Fay who first urged Mankind to look with new eyes at "the other side of a fit". His simple, yet profound, insight into the nature of seizures changed everything.
But then he began by asking the right question: What is the cause and purpose of the seizure?
Rather than beginning with the assumption that seizures are inherently bad and must be stopped Fay reasoned that when Mother Nature and the Good Lord conspire it is to save man rather than to kill him.
Thousands and thousands of children are put on medications the only purpose of which is to stop or prevent seizures. These medications are often addictive, suppress neurological function, cause nutritional problems, disrupt digestion, create absorption problems, and sometimes cause seizures.
If Dr. Fay is right (and we now have more than a half a century of hard data that says he is right) then virtually everything that the conventional world is doing to stop seizures is wrong.
Fay's first wrote about seizures in 1942. We are now entering a new millennium and the battle is far from won.
Dr. Fay thought it would take the world about ten years to understand and implement the actions he proposed. He overestimated the willingness of his fellows to learn something new and greatly underestimated the degree of difficulty in removing a lie which has been programmed into our collective consciousness with such ferocious frequency, intensity and duration.
Dr. Fay shined light into the darkness and Glenn Doman, Dr. Raymundo Veras, Dr. Roselise Wilkinson, and Dr. Edward LeWinn carved a pathway. Without question Dr. Wilkinson has helped more children to be free of anticonvulsant medication than any physician in history.
Today that pathway is clear. Following in their giant footsteps Dr. Thompson, The Institutes medical director, helps physicians who write to us from all over the world to eliminate anticonvulsant medication safely and effectively.
As Fay proposed over a half century ago, we need to see to it that children are not put on these medications in the first place–this would be even better.
