Review: Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Such an important syndrome. This is a rare but incredibly important syndrome to diagnose because of the treatment possibility and the risk of underlying tumor or other disease that may also be associated with the syndrome. There are many various antibody mediated neurological syndromes that fall within this spectrum, some of which present as a psychiatric disorder. In medicine, one of the biggest traps, is to think like a textbook. What I mean by that is that when you learn diseases or syndromes, you learn all the symptoms at once, as though they present this way. In fact more often the patient presents with one thing, then a period of time later something else develops. Slowly the complexity of the syndrome revels itself. Fortunately there are brilliant research/physicians who put all the pieces together and then bring the lab work to the bedside and solve some of these mysteries.


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