Dr. Alcy Torres grew up in Ecuador in a family of doctors, learning that doctors need to help people.

Claudia Lopez’s 7-year-old son had one eye that would not stop blinking, rapidly, like some kind of misplaced hummingbird’s wing. Lopez’s pediatrician thought it was a facial tic, caused by a neurological condition like Tourette syndrome, and recommended she take her son to Boston Medical Center.

There was a specific reason why. It has a new bilingual pediatric neurology practice, the first such program in Boston, and, it appears, in the state.

Lopez made the half-hour trip from her home in Lynn to BMC, where she met Dr. Alcy Torres, who speaks Spanish fluently. As Torres took a medical history from Lopez, she shared with him that her son had been waking up in the middle of the night, confused. He wasn’t having nightmares, she told him, or night terrors.

This was a possible sign of nocturnal epileptic seizures. Coupled with the facial tic being in just one eye, Torres thought the boy had been misdiagnosed. It turned out he was suffering from repeated small epileptic seizures.

The misdiagnosis, Torres says, “just shows how language can throw very good physicians off track.” Without his ability to communicate in Spanish with Lopez, it would have been harder for Torres to gather the clues he needed to make his own diagnosis.

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