Brain on Fire in book reviews

subtitle: My month of madness

author: Susannah Cahalan

This is an AMAZING book. It's like the show "mystery diagnosis" where the patient goes through doctor after doctor, diagnosis after diagnosis and no one gets it right. She received at least a half dozen different ideas about what ailed her... and different treatments.

Finally a doctor had an idea that worked. And luckily for her a doctor at a university hospital had recently investigated and wrote up the type of disease she had. Since her symptoms ranged from paranoia to seizures to borderline catatonia, it was a difficult disease to find the root of.

It's a disturbing book - her medical costs topped one MILLION dollars - and it's something that the doctors don't know the root cause of. It's a fast read.