Michigan doctor faces trial over misdiagnosing epilepsy

DETROIT (AP) — Mariah Martinez was 9 years old when she got bad news about her chronic headaches: A doctor said she had epilepsy.

Over the next four years, the suburban Detroit girl took anti-seizure medicine that made her feel sluggish and was occasionally hooked to a machine that recorded her brain waves. She was told to avoid activities that would rouse her heart, making her the target of teasing by other kids at school.

But then a different doctor delivered astonishing news in 2007: Mariah didn't have epilepsy.

"How could that be?" her mother, Laura Abdel-Slater, recalled. "Epilepsy is something that's not curable."

Martinez, now 26, is the first of what could be many former patients to go to trial accusing Dr. Yasser Awaad and his former employer, Oakwood Healthcare, of malpractice and negligence. Jury selection starts Monday.

Awaad ordered tests on hundreds of Detroit-area children and intentionally misread the results, telling them they had epilepsy or some other seizure disorder, say lawyers for Martinez. The diagnoses disrupted their lives, forcing them to take medicines they didn't need and to undergo further tests during repeat visits.

The lawyers allege that Oakwood was running an "EEG mill," a reference to an electroencephalogram, a test to measure brain activity. The Dearborn medical center was "ecstatic with Dr. Awaad's suspiciously high productivity because all it cared about was making money," they argue in a recent court filing.

Epilepsy is a brain disorder that causes seizures, which are short changes in normal brain activity. Medicine is a common treatment, but nerve stimulation through an implanted device sometimes is another choice. More than 3 million people in the U.S., or 1.2% of the population, have active epilepsy, according to the U.S....