Managing your treatment
Care and treatment plans
A care plan is an overview of your epilepsy and its treatment and management. It includes information about your epilepsy and seizures, and other issues that may be important to you, such as education, work, driving, and starting a family.
You should be offered a care plan, particularly if your epilepsy is recently diagnosed. This might be part of the letter that your specialist will write following an appointment. If you are not offered a care plan you can ask for one.
Part of a care plan includes a treatment (or medication) plan. This sets out how your epilepsy will be treated and usually includes how to start and increase your medication, and what to do if it does not work or you have side effects.
Your care plan is made by you and your specialist together. You should be given a copy of the plan which is usually also given to your GP. It should be reviewed and updated when needed.
How do I know if treatment is working?
Often the best way to measure how well treatment is working is to look at whether your seizures have stopped or if you are having fewer seizures. Keeping a seizure diary can help to record how many seizures you are having, when they happen, if anything triggers them and if your medication is reducing or stopping them. Find out more about seizure diaries
Monitoring epilepsy and medication
How doctors monitor epilepsy including therapeutic drug monitoring which checks the effectiveness of drugs taken by people with epilepsy.
If medication doesn't work
Most people’s seizures are controlled with medication. That is why medication is usually the type of treatment that is tried first. But if medication doesn’t stop all your seizures, or only stops some of them, there are other types of treatment that might be considered
Coming off anti-seizure medication
If someone has not had a seizure for two or more years then they may think about withdrawing (coming off) their ASM.