Western medicine classifies epilepsy into two main categories, idiopathic epilepsy and secondary (symptomatic) epilepsy, depending on the cause of the epilepsy. The former refers to this group of patients whose brain disease does not have structural changes or metabolic abnormalities that can explain the symptoms, but is more closely related to genetic factors. Symptomatic epilepsy is due to a variety of brain lesions and metabolic disorders, such as congenital disorders, prenatal and perinatal disorders (birth trauma is a common cause of epilepsy in infancy), sequelae of febrile convulsions, trauma, infection, poisoning, intracranial tumors, cerebrovascular disease, and nutritional metabolic disorders. The generation of epilepsy is associated with abnormal neuronal discharges. When the human body is at rest, the firing frequency of one cortical pyramidal cell generally remains between 1 and 10 times/second, while in epileptic foci, the firing frequency of a group of pathological neurons can be as high as hundreds of times per second. The high-frequency repetitive firing of a population of cells in the epileptic foci generates large postsynaptic potentials in the neurons directly connected to their axons, resulting in continuous propagation until the seizure is terminated by inhibitory effects (including the activity of inhibitory nerve cells in the epileptic periphery, the recycling of excitatory material by glial cells, and the involvement of inhibitory bodies outside the foci). Various forms of seizures are caused by different propagation pathways and ranges. Epileptic activity may involve only one region of the cerebral cortex without further spread, causing a simple partial seizure; excitation is transmitted to neighboring neurons in the precentral or postcentral gyrus through an increase in extracellular potassium ions following discharge, causing Jacksonian epilepsy; epileptic activity often spreads from the cerebral cortex to the thalamus and midbrain reticular formation via downward projecting fibers, causing loss of consciousness, which is then transmitted by the diffuse thalamic projection system to the the entire cerebral cortex, producing secondary generalized tonic clonic seizures.