Feel like your world is spinning? Unless you’re in love, that’s not such a good thing.
For those of us who aren’t in that heady new-love stage, dizziness is at best annoying and at worst debilitating. But dizziness, particularly vertigo – which causes balance problems, nausea, vomiting, fatigue and lightheadedness — is treatable with chiropractic care.
Dizziness accounts for six months’ worth of doctor’s office and emergency room visits annually in the United States, with 54 percent of those being ER visits. Two percent of those visits will end up in a cerebrovascular event, or CVE, such as a stroke or a seizure. Post-accidents trip to the doc or the ER account for another 8.5 percent of those visits, and 30 to 40 percent are because of a condition that is treatable with chiropractic – Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo, or BPPV.
BPPV is rarely life-threatening, and patients typically respond well to chiropractic care without the sedatives many patients are prescribed to address it after a trip to the doctor. Let’s be honest, sedatives leave you groggy, tired, unable to function. So that leaves you with the choice of living with the dizziness associated with BPPV or not living your life fully. Chiropractic care doesn’t require such an impossible choice.
The key is understanding what’s going on with your body, which is the foundation of what I do as a chiropractor. The first step is to find out what’s causing your dizziness and associated symptoms. Testing will rule out other causes and make sure chiropractic adjustment is a safe and effective treatment plan. If not, I’ll recommend you see a specialist that can better treat your condition.
It’s important to note that life-threatening health issues that include dizziness as a symptom often have other telling symptoms. Dizziness will be a symptom of only 1 percent of tumor cases, 6 percent of stroke cases and 1.5 percent of heart attack cases. Those would be instances of dizziness I would not treat. I also wouldn’t treat you if your dizziness were tied to thyroid disease, an electrolyte imbalance, hypoglycemia, anemia, toxicity, autoimmune disease and infections.
But if your dizziness is linked to BPPV, we can address it together.
BPPV is caused by otoliths, also known as ear rocks, which are the sensors for your equilibrium. If one of those ear rocks becomes lodged in one of the three canals in your ear, say from an auto accident, dizziness follows. Your brain gets false signals that your body isn’t in the right place, even if it is.
So, I start by administering the Dix Hallpike Maneuver, in which I rapidly move you into different positions to determine just where that ear rock is stuck. Once I know that, I can perform the Epley or Semont Maneuver, which is very effective. In three to four treatments, 80 percent of patients are free of their dizziness. It should be noted that there is a 15 percent recurrence rate; once the ear rocks become lodged in a canal, they are more likely to do so again.
A typical treatment plan will include evaluation, two treatment on the first day and then sleeping instructions for two days. Seventy percent of patients experience improvement at this point. This approach is repeated for two more days, after which 20 percent more of patients experience relief (unfortunately, the remaining 10 percent won’t get better).
Then it is time for rehabilitation, which comes in three phases: Adaptation, which focuses on hand-eye coordination; compensation, which is balance retraining; and habituation, which focuses on the repeated actions that used to cause dizziness, so they won’t do so in the future.
Again, chiropractic care isn’t the answer for every case of dizziness, but it is a good choice for many who are looking to get themselves back on solid ground again.
