Epilepsy is a chronic disease with a high incidence of sudden loss of consciousness in patients who have seizures, anytime, anywhere, and fall to the ground. It brings great danger to the personal safety of patients and also affects their physical and mental health, as well as their daily life, work and study. Therefore, epilepsy must be treated promptly. The majority of patients can effectively control and reduce their seizures, even after several years of regular medication, the patient’s epilepsy can be maintained for a long time without seizures, and gradually reduce to stop medication. However, there are some patients whose condition worsens for various reasons and transforms into intractable epilepsy. Refractory epilepsy generally does not respond well to medication and requires consideration of surgical treatment. Current surgical procedures for epilepsy include epileptic focal resection and vagus nerve electrical stimulation. Focal resection requires the identification of the causative site and the removal of the causative site through craniotomy for the treatment of epilepsy. However, not all patients with epilepsy are suitable for this procedure. A large proportion of patients have scattered or imprecise localization of the foci, or are located in important functional areas, which makes focal resection impossible. Vagus nerve stimulation, a minimally invasive procedure that does not require craniotomy, suppresses the excitability of cortical neurons by stimulating the vagus nerve on one side of the neck, resulting in a reduction in the number of seizures and even complete control of epilepsy in some patients. This opens up new treatment avenues for patients with intractable epilepsy who cannot undergo resection surgery or who have recurrence after resection. The advantage of vagus nerve stimulation is a non-destructive procedure with no damage to brain tissue and function and few side effects, which can improve the patient’s quality of life, improve memory, reduce the impact of recurrent seizures on the patient’s intelligence, and reduce the side effects of long-term medication.