INTERESTING TIMES

Neurology
( notes, Collins speaking after midterm )

If you read here then you heard about Rand Paul's media disaster. Now is it Sharron Angle's turn. She had a website in which she called for the dissolution of many popular parts of our government including the Department of Education. Then she won the Republican primary in Nevada. The night after she won her entire website had been pulled, but the record of her positions is ubiquitous. And even though I can grasp at the rationale behind the desire to shrink government so radically, I cannot get any of my liberal friends to even think about how it could work out. They just say she's nuts and she has no chance. I don't know anything about this woman but I'm pretty sure she's not as astute as Rand Paul, and he got injured pretty badly by the media slams on his positions. The tea party is fueled by the anger and frustration of people who are out of work while banks are bailed out. Within the tea party there is no agreement on a platform. The tea party is not even a party. The republicans are attempting to tame the tea party candidates that win public elections, to maintain their half of the chokehold on our government. I just wish that the tea party candidates made more sense. Many of them seem to be more charismatic than they are educated. I am sympathetic to libertarian principles and agreed that we need radical change. I wish that the conceptual divides were not so large, or that we were less prone to declaring each other insane. We are all crazy; the differences lie merely in the intensity and timing of our disconnection from reality. And in my view, our entire culture is mad. Bonkers. We are collectively off our rocker. The left and the right are shooting nonsense messages at each other at increasing speed. So I suppose it's no surprise that we are having cultural siezures.

-- = aka Jacksonian siezure or march
--named for the guy who figured it out
--involves progression of the location of the seizure in the brain --> a "march" of motor presentation
--initiated with abnormal electrical activity in primary motor cortex
--why this kind is unique: it travels through the primary motor cortex in a succession, affecting the corresponding muscles, often beginning with the fingers
--felt as tingling in fingers, then hand
--moves more proximal
--S/Sx: head/eye movements, tingling, numbness, smacking lips, muscle contractions

ON DRUG MECHANISMS
print chart from this page: http://www.e-epilepsy.org.uk/pages/articles/show_article.cfm?id=127

from Mechanisms of action of anti-epileptic drugs
Andrew Fisher, Matthew C Walker and Norman G Bowery*

Department of Clinical and Experimental Epilepsy, Institute of Neurology, UCL, London, and *Department of Pharmacology, University of Birmingham Medical School, Birmingham

THREE main mechanisms by which current drugs appear to produce their anticonvulsant activity:
1) Modulation of intrinsic membrane conductances, primarily voltage-gated cationic channels
2) Suppression of excitatory amino acid-mediated synaptic transmission
3) Enhancement of GABAergic inhibitory synaptic transmission, via post-synaptic receptor modulation, inhibition of GABA metabolism or blockade of GABA transport.
( voltage gated sodium and calcium channels, GABA, glutamate and drugs )