After a blow to the head, or a collision causing someone’s head to whip around, there’s a chance you’ve had a concussion, and there’s also the chance your doctor hasn’t properly identified it. Common symptoms of concussion are vertigo and dizziness (as well as headache, nausea, light and sound sensitivity).
Have you had vertigo before, or are you currently experiencing it? Have you been feeling dizzy or light headed for a while? If so, you’re an excellent candidate for functional vestibular rehabilitation by Chandler’s only Chiropractic Neurology practice. At Arizona Chiropractic Neurology Center, our doctors have more than 20 years experience in the diagnosis and treatment of Vertigo and Dizziness. Whether your vertigo/dizziness symptoms came on suddenly without a known cause and never went away, occurred after head trauma, sports injury or car accident, is diagnosed as BPPV, coincide with neck pain and stiffness, or they correlate with migraine/headache pain, we may be able to help.
Don’t fit the mold? Welcome to Chiropractic Neurology and Vestibular Rehab
BPPV (Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo) is very common and easy to treat. However, what if your vertigo is caused by something different? In many cases, it is. A common cause of vertigo that we see in our office is the result of a disconnection between individual eye muscles during normal motion. In many of these cases we detect that there is a weakness in one or more of the independent muscles that control our eye movements. As a result of this weakness there is abnormal movement of the eyes when the person is looking at an object, thus creating aberrancies in the information being sent from the eyes to a part of our brain known as the Vestibular System. This eye muscle weakness is often not even noticed by the patient, however upon clinical examination the doctor will often notice dysmetric, or inaccurate, eye movements. It will often be seen when the doctor is performing neurological eye testing on the patient, looking for functional incongruency during optokinetics (eye movements). In other words, when your eye movements are inconsistent, they send abnormal information to your brain, causing you to feel dizzy or light headed. The actually spinning during vertigo is due to inaccurate, fast saccadic eye movements back to mid-line. This is a result of unilateral dysfunction of your vestibular system (inner ear structure).
Other contributors are functional cerebellar deficits (which occur when the body attempts to adapt to problems in our vestibular system), PMRF deficits (vestibular nuclei centers that receive information from peripheral vestibular structures), Cortical FEF (frontal eye field) deficit, or imbalance between two hemispheres/halves of the brain (appropriate communication between these two halves is important for allowing visual focus/attention and suppressing nystagmus or dizziness), and cervical or neck issues which send improper information to the brain.
Common symptoms associated with Vertigo/Dizziness:
- Nausea
- Difficulty driving
- Difficulty being in places with a lot of sensory input (grocery store, walking through a parking lot, movie theater)
- Eye elevation differences (one eye is higher than the other)
- Moving your head causes symptoms
- Hearing loss
- Visual disturbance
- Migraines
- Imbalance/gait ataxia (unsteadiness when walking)
- Dizziness or light-headed when shifting from seated to standing
- A feeling that you are disconnected from your body, a sense of confusion
- Spatial disorientation
- Depression associated with chronic vertigo
- Spinning
In our office we use Videonystagmography, Saccadometry and Dynamic Posturography (balance) testing to help triangulate where the problems are, and they help us to improve their function.
