Ima Ebong, MD - UK HealthCare

Transcript:
[MUSIC PLAYING] My name is Dr. Ima Ebong. I am an assistant professor of neurology and clinical neurophysiology here at the University of Kentucky. We have a multidisciplinary team consisting of neurologists, neurosurgeons, nurses, mid-level practitioners, as well as technologists, and all these people come together to diagnose and to treat epilepsy.

I see people with generalized epilepsy as well as focal epilepsy. I also treat patients with what's called psychogenic nonepileptic seizures, and those types of seizures pretty much are a hybrid between neurological and psychiatric diseases. In terms of my neuromuscular patients, I see anything from neuropathy to myopathies. I also see people with psychogenic neuromuscular disorders.

One of my hats is the Director of Diversity and Inclusion for the Department of Neurology, and I'm also one of the diversity representatives for the College of Medicine. Diversity and health care is important, because not only are there better patient outcomes, but there's better teaching and better experience for our trainees. They learn how to tolerate and accept people from different backgrounds, different cultures, different races, different beliefs.

I enjoy seeing patients in clinic as well as in the hospital, talking to families, and getting to know my patients more than just their diagnoses. Recently, I had an 18-year-old boy come to my clinic who was misdiagnosed for a long time with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and he was just brushed off as not being able to learn. The reason why is because he would just stare in class. He would just have moments where he would stare off out in space, and his teachers thought that he was not paying attention.

When I heard the story from the mother, and I saw what the patient was doing in my clinic, I told the mother right then and there, he has epilepsy. She shook her head. She said, oh, no, when he was little, he had an EEG. It was normal. I said, usually the first EEG, especially if it was a 30-minute EEG, would not diagnose epilepsy. So I brought him in not too long after that to the Epilepsy Monitoring Unit, and I was able to capture seizures and confirm that he had epilepsy.

To me, neurologists are detectives in medicine. We're the ones that actually go in and talk to the patients, get a full history, do a full clinical examination. And almost all the time, I can diagnose my patients based on the history and physical exam, and I love that.

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