Laura Garro is a professor of anthropology at UCLA, so this shows her extensive background in athropology, and indicates that she writes this article with that sort of background, rather than a medical one.
The arguments are supported by the stories told by individuals and families and cultural reasearch to help understand the stories.
I looked up Turkish marriage traditions, EMS systems, and the languages spoken.
The Turkish culture associates "epillepsy" with mental retardation, so they usually refer to seizures as 'fainting". This can cause confusion when in a medical setting, as fainting and seizures are two different issues. The stories usually falled into one of five plot categories. The conditions were typically caused by a frightful experience, a childhood fever or injury, no apparent reason, chronic suffering, or an evil eye. These classifications help see trends and learn where improvements can be made.
The article was compiled from a lot of personal stories, paired with research about culture, medicine, and beliefs.
Most of the data was collected through the stories that the people told the researchers. This was the best way for them to collect data, since most conditions are best told through stories. They were then able to pull numbers out or ask specific questions catered to the story.
This article appears to be cited in a variety of different publications, from papers on managing diabetes to aging.
Emergency response is not directly discussed in this article, however seizures are a common reason to call for EMS. Seizures, or "fainting" as they called it, can be dangerous, especially if the patient is alone or if it is at night. If there are a lot of people with epillepsy that is not controlled, then there could be an overload on the EMS system.
**Linda not Laura as I previously stated
"It is tempting for a medical social scientist to enumerate the cultural beliefs concerning thecause and workings of epilepsy, then compare these with beliefs in other societies. People of course reason about illness, and culture provides the logic of that rationality. I have resisted, however, focusing on the structure of reasoning. The transformation of these narratives and the modes of aesthetic response associated with stories into "beliefs" or "explanation" would be extremely misleading."
"I began this chapter with questions about the relation of "fainting" to "epilepsy" in Turkish culture provoked by Meliha Hanim' s stories about her illness. Through the course of our research it became clear that epilepsy belongs in popular discourse to the larger domain of "fainting." This should come as no surprise, not only because fainting is less stigmatizing than epilepsy in Turkish culture."
"Emine was silent. Her story was told exclusively by those around her."