Epilepsy, whose common name is “sheep epilepsy” or “goat horns”, is an ancient disease. It was recorded as early as 2,200 years ago in the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine, where the word “epilepsy” means madness, indicating a disorder of consciousness during seizures, and “epilepsy” means convulsions, indicating a spastic state during seizures. This disease is not unfamiliar to people. With its high incidence and special form of seizure, it is one of the most misunderstood disorders by patients and their families, non-neurological medical professionals and even the real society. Helping patients and their families and even the whole society to get out of the misunderstanding of epilepsy is a great help to get rid of the psychological shadow of patients, integrate into the society and finally achieve the quality of life. Hao Yong of the Department of Neurology, Shanghai Renji Hospital, has shown that epilepsy is a common disease with an epidemiological survey showing its incidence of 5‰-7‰, with about 6.5-9.1 million patients nationwide. Epilepsy is seen in all age groups, with adolescents and the elderly being the two peak age groups for epilepsy onset. All epilepsies have an etiology, but limited by the limitations in understanding the causes of epilepsy, some causes are known to humans and others are being explored. The former is referred to as symptomatic or secondary epilepsy and the latter as idiopathic epilepsy. The former is called symptomatic epilepsy, and the latter is called idiopathic epilepsy. The clinical manifestations suggest symptomatic epilepsy, but the cause is not yet clear. The patient’s convulsions are one of the main symptoms of epilepsy, but they are not unique to epilepsy, and not all patients with epilepsy have convulsions. Some patients have only sensory, behavioral and mental abnormalities at the onset of the disease, without physical convulsions, but they are also epileptic patients. Other diseases can also cause convulsions, such as hysterical convulsions, hypocalcemic convulsions, pediatric hyperthermic convulsions, and hypoglycemic convulsions that are not epilepsy. Therefore, convulsions may not always be due to epilepsy. Also, some types of epilepsy do not have convulsion symptoms, such as aphasic seizures, temporal lobe epilepsy, ventral epilepsy, and headache epilepsy. Therefore, convulsions should not be equated with epilepsy.2. What exactly is epilepsy? It is now considered a better definition: epilepsy is a disease and syndrome characterized by intermittent central nervous system dysfunction caused by repeated and sudden over-discharge of neurons in the brain. It is a disorder of varying degrees of motor sensory, autonomic, consciousness, and mental status that originates in the brain and has recurrent seizures. This definition encapsulates the complexity of epilepsy symptoms and, more importantly, the two basic characteristics of epilepsy, namely, recurrent and seizure nature. By recurrent, we mean that after having a first seizure, a second, third, or even multiple seizures are sure to occur after an interval. Even the most common convulsion, if it occurs only once, is not recurrent and is not diagnosed as epilepsy. By seizure nature, we mean that the symptoms appear suddenly and also abruptly. We may have seen patients who are walking or eating suddenly fall to the ground and convulse, and then return to normal after some time. Other children with abdominal epilepsy suddenly have severe abdominal pain, crying or falling to the ground while they are having fun, and then continue to play again after a few minutes or a few minutes. No matter how complex the symptoms of epilepsy are, these two features must be present. This is also an important basis for the diagnosis of epilepsy.3. What are the characteristics of epilepsy? There are two characteristics of human epilepsy, namely epileptiform discharges on the EEG and clinical seizures in epilepsy. In turn, there are two main characteristics of clinical seizures in epilepsy: ①Commonality: is a common feature shared by all seizures, i.e. seizure, transient, repetitive, and stereotyped. Seizures occur suddenly and resume rapidly after a period of time, with normal intervals; transience means that the duration of seizures is very short, seconds or minutes, except for status epilepticus, which rarely exceeds 5 minutes; repetitiveness means that epilepsy is characterized by repeated seizures, and only one seizure should not be easily diagnosed as epilepsy; stereotypy means that the clinical manifestations of multiple seizures are almost the same for a patient. ②Personality: i.e., the characteristics that different types of epilepsy have. It is the main basis for distinguishing one type of epilepsy from another. For example, generalized tonic-clonic seizures are characterized by loss of consciousness and generalized tonic contractions followed by clonic sequences of activity; loss of consciousness, which occurs suddenly and terminates rapidly, is characteristic of an absence of consciousness; and automatism is characterized by seemingly purposeful but actually purposeless actions accompanied by impaired consciousness.