Comment by vacri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vacri | Hacker News Reader

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> if someone is in pain/unhealthy there is a reason. Rarely it is psychological

Work in medicine, and you'll find a lot of malingerers. Some of them don't even realise that they're faking it. Yes, it sucks from your point of view that no-one believes you, but from the other side, a lot of people fake it, and you have to sort out what's actually going on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munchausen_syndrome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munchausen_syndrome_by_proxy

I used to be a neuro tech and have done a lot of EEGs in my time. There are enough people faking seizures to make it a non-trivial issue. Munchausen-by-proxy is a particularly sad problem, where parents make their kids sick in order to get some attention or compassion from others.

How do people fake seizures? Do they just flop around on the ground?

They just shake their limbs back and forth or their body. It's pretty easy for anyone familiar with seizures to tell a fake, since most fakers shake their limbs back and forth evenly - a sort of even sawtooth pattern of movement. However, jerky movement in seizures is contraction-relax-contraction-relax, contracting in one direction only, not back-and-forth jerking. People also aren't conscious during full-body seizures (though they are if it's partial-body), so if they're looking around focusing on things, looking at your response, or talking, that's a giveaway.

One point to note, though, is that you can't just assume that everyone faking a seizure doesn't have epilepsy. Quite a lot of fakers do, and they fake for different reasons. A lot like the attention they get after a seizure. Others come in to have an EEG and think that they need to have a seizure to help the diagnosis, so they 'help out' with good intentions (not common, but common enough). Very very rarely you might encounter a real seizure that looks like a fake, though these are generally other kinds of seizures (various kinds of 'partial' seizures), not the full-body-shaking ones.

Wow, interesting. Thanks for sharing your experiences.

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