Vertigo and dizziness can affect every aspect of our lives when it hits us hard and won’t go away. We may have imbalance while moving, or the room might spin while we’re lying still causing nausea or vomiting. At our chiropractic clinic in North Ogden, Dr. Favero provides specific treatments to help you get better and feel normal again.
WHAT’S THE CAUSE?
The first thing for Dr. Favero to discover with his examination is: What’s the cause of your dizziness or vertigo? In short, it can come from the neck, the ears, diet, or improper pressure in the head.
Neck – Tightness, injury, and joint restrictions in the cervical region of the spine can create many complaints. The upper neck is especially associated with vertigo and dizziness, and problems here can also cause numbness/tingling in the face, jaw pain, and hearing/vision problems.
Ears – There are many places throughout body that the brain uses to detect movement and keep us standing up straight. One of these is in our ears. Tiny stones called “otoliths”, or sometimes simply called “ear crystals”, rest on small hair cells in the inner ear. The hairs send messages to the brain based on detected movements of these crystals, which helps the brain determine our position in space (up, down, left, right). When these stones become dislodged and move into the nearby semicircular canals, the brain gets tricked and misinterprets where our head is at. This condition is called Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV) or more simply, Benign Positional Vertigo (BPV). It is thought to come from changing pressures in the ears, and in our clinical experience most commonly comes from recent flights on airplanes, driving up and down mountain passes, scuba diving, or recent sinus/ear infections.
Diet – This usually comes from not eating properly (not the correct nutrients, or from not eating regularly) or from not having enough hydration.
Pressure – Blood pressure, especially when decreased, can cause a dizziness or lightheaded feeling after making fast movements like getting up from sitting or lying down. Another cause could be swelling in the head, which is most likely from a recent trauma, though could also come from a growth taking up space in the intracranial cavity.
WHAT CAN BE DONE?
At Favero Chiropractic we can provide treatment and guidance for all these causes, though when due to pressure there are likely further steps that need to be taken (sometimes requiring emergency referral). Once Dr. Favero diagnoses the reason for your symptoms, he can begin treatment on that same day.
For the neck this will involve chiropractic adjustments to the cervical spine and focused attention on the tissues in surrounding areas (such as the suboccipital muscles). This helps restore proper movement and reduce pressure on the upper neck in particular.
For BPV, there is a specific treatment discovered by a chiropractor that is applied by moving the patient in a series of directions to bring the otoliths back to their correct place. The chiropractor’s name was Dr. John Epley, so we usually call it the Epley Maneuver. Another name is the canalith repositioning procedure. These treatments can be life-changing, and bring a patient back into the realm of “normal life” again.
HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE?
The most common number of treatments for BPV is 3-5 visits. These are done every 1-2 days, and on your final visit we make sure you’ve had no returns of the vertigo so we know we’ve got it under control. Rarely patients will have another episode in the future, but fortunately they have already found an effective solution so return for treatment without having to make the search they did the first time.
When the cause is cervicogenic, it can sometimes require a series of treatments and home care recommendations, and other times have quite immediate improvement. Patients often find additional benefits during the process such as better movement in the neck, less muscle tension, and relief from headaches.