Psychogenic seizures and medical humor: Jokes as a damaging defense
Epilepsy & Behavior Volume 64, Part A, November 2016, Pages 26–28
October 8, 2016
Benjamin Tolchin, Gaston Baslet, Barbara Dworetzky
“Doctor has pseudoseizure to avoid seeing patient with pseudoseizures.”
The headline and article from GomerBlog, the medical satire internet site frequented by physicians and other healthcare workers, is widely popular, having been shared on social media approximately 9200 times, and is only one of 22 articles on the site poking fun atpsychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES, historically known as “pseudoseizures”) and the patients who have them [1]. The implied joke of the article is two-fold: that patients with PNES are difficult and unpleasant to deal with and that PNES are consciously faked to avoid dealing with difficult or unpleasant experiences. Healthcare workers, who frequently encounter patients with PNES in the emergency department (ED), clinic, orepilepsy monitoring unit (EMU), will be familiar with many similar jokes and complaints.
Read the full article at Epilepsy & Behavior
Benjamin Tolchin, MD, MS is a fellow in clinical neurophysiology and epilepsy at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a member of the Hospital Ethics Committee. He is also an alumni of the Fellowship in Bioethics (Fellowship year 2015-2016).