When Aarti Sathyanarayana shadowed a neurologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, it sparked an idea that could change how doctors treat epilepsy.
Sathyanarayana saw how doctors were evaluating whether they’d picked the right medication for epilepsy in a patient. It’s largely a trial-and-error approach, she says. The doctor will prescribe medication and then the patient will return home and track the number of seizures that they experience, she explains, sometimes with a monitoring device to help, and sometimes manually. If it’s not effective, the doctor will repeat the process with another medication or dosage until they find the right treatment for that patient’s body.
