“What Makes Me Dizzy Can Help Me Heal."
This statement, while confusing, forms one of the basic principles of Vestibular Rehabilitation. Vestibular Rehabilitation deals with the diagnosis and treatment of conditions causing dizziness, vertigo, and other associated afflictions such as balance dysfunction, nausea, and headaches.
The most common ailment for people seeking Vestibular Rehabilitation is dizziness. But how can the thing(s) that makes a person dizzy actually help in the healing process? To understand this statement, one must understand the Vestibular Rehabilitation process.
The goal of Vestibular Rehabilitation is to resolve or diminish feelings of dizziness and the ailments that often accompany it, like nausea, unsteadiness and motion sensitivity. The assessment is detailed, complex, and examines the various aspects of the vestibular system which regulates balance and acts as an important feedback loop to our brain.
The assessment involves a neurological exam to determine if the dizziness is coming from a more central (brain) disorder or peripheral (vestibular part of the inner ears) disorder. To understand all the complexities of these systems, the Vestibular Therapist needs to understand what triggers the dizziness.
Once the trigger(s) is identified, a diagnosis starts to form, helped by the assessment data and medical input from the patient’s physician. When an understanding is reached about the patient’s condition, the Vestibular Therapist starts to formulate a treatment plan.
The treatment for dizziness often revolves around the trigger. While it might seem natural to avoid things that make a person dizzy, actually inching into what provokes the dizziness is an integral part of ‘re-setting’ the impaired feedback loop between the brain and the vestibular system.
A series of exercises, known as habituation exercises, are implemented to gradually take the patient into the provoking stimuli until the system no longer recognizes it as an error signal, and the dizziness is reduced and often eliminated.
This typically involves provoking the dizziness gradually and carefully in the treatment sessions. When the patient understands the principle of habituating to dizziness it can be summed up as: “What makes me dizzy can help me heal."
When people understand that the brain actually needs to be exposed to the things that bring on dizziness in a very gradual and controlled manner, treatment becomes less daunting and the patient is less likely to enter into avoidance strategies. Healing begins and a more successful outcome from Vestibular Therapy is achieved.
It can take a bit of ‘trial and error’ to figure out how much a person can push into their symptoms and still have an acceptable, brief recovery period.
Lifemark’s Vestibular Therapists are trained to help identify whether or not a patient is appropriate for a habituation approach.
We have Vestibular Therapists at over 100 Lifemark clinics coast-to-coast ready to help you with your dizziness or balance problems. For more information or to find a therapist near you visit our vestibular services page.
This article was originally authored by Janet MacDonald.
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