In My Words: Meet the Leads – Dr. Jorge Burneo | Neurologist and Epileptologist

I don’t really have anybody in my family who is a physician. So I was the first physician in my family. And so during medical school, when I became exposed to neurology, I met a physician who inspired me a lot. And her name is Patricia Campos.  She’s a pediatric neurologist. And she explained how the nervous system works.

She explained how your human body reacts to certain things that happen in your brain or in your nerves in general. It caught my attention and I became more interested. I read more about neurology, and I found that to be fascinating. And why did I decide to go into epilepsy? Because epilepsy is one of these the most common neurological diseases where I’m from, Peru, likely because of a parasite or trauma, lack of adequate prenatal care.

And that’s what made me go into epilepsy. When I came to London in 2004, I was interested in doing more imaging, but then I started doing more epidemiological research. And then I found very interesting the disparities that we have in epilepsy care in Canada. And I joined Carter (Snead) to help with his provincial initiative to improve epilepsy care in the province [Ontario].

And and I found that we were successful in lobbying for more beds, more personnel and more budget. And the fact that it would be important to share the knowledge with those who are in the frontline, like the primary care providers or the internist or the pediatricians, and what better opportunity than ECHO in which we will be provide education to those individuals through cases basically, which is I think is the most interesting part of [ECHO]. It was very helpful.

Clip of Family Physician Case Presenter Dr. Jude Obomighie:
There were recommendations made as to what investigations I could do and what changes I could make to the medication. Just last month, he had a notice that I would see this gentleman.

Clip from epileptologist who is providing recommendation to Dr. Obomighie: I think we could come up with a nice set of options for you Jude.

Epilepsy is not just one disease in which we can just go ahead and treated the same way for everybody. Everybody has different problems. Having seizures is just one part of the problem. And sometimes in order to control the seizures, which is at the end the ultimate goal, you need to focus on the mental health and the social issues that may be related. So you have to consider many things, not just treat the patient with medications and that’s it.

ECHO is an example in which you will be providing education, but at the same time you provide clinical care because you are discussing a real-life case that one of the providers brings to the session. But at the same time, you are educating them, which is quite similar to what we do on a daily basis with our residents [at Western University].

The beauty of ECHO is that we approach it at different levels from the medical one, you know what medication this patient has these diagnoses; to the psychological one, because we always have a psychologist or a clinical psychologist attending, providing feedback on the mental health of the patient; to the community, to the community agency telling you, “oh, yeah, we have these resources or this place has these resources and you should send that patient to this place for that.”
So it’s a different levels, different ways to approach it, not just the medical one, which is, “Oh yeah, prescribe this [medication] and see you in three months.”

Each patient is different, and you have to treat them with not only a lot of respect, but mainly trying to identify what are the most important needs they have and try to tackle them.