There is a way to treat the cause of balance problems, instead of just taking medication to treat the symptoms, and usually it is very simple.
Vertigo, dizziness and balance problems come from a dysfunction of the vestibular organ, which is a small but important structure in your inner ear that is critical for balance, coordination, and movement. Vestibular disorders are often treated with daily medication that only helps to control the symptoms, but more and more patients and their doctors are choosing to treat the disorder with an exercise-based approach called vestibular disorder treatment, or VRT.
Infrared goggles are the very latest technology used to detect vestibular disorders. Since vestibular organ and eye reflexes are intimately connected, close examination of abnormal eye movement with the goggles allows your local vestibular disorder specialist to accurately detect the specific type of problem. Once an accurate diagnosis has been made, treatment becomes relatively simple.
A lot of people struggle for months or years with positional vertigo and don’t realize how easy it is to treat. Generally, most patients only require 1 to 3 treatments. Vestibular disorder treatment starts with a thorough evaluation of medical history and an observation and measure of posture, balance and gait, and compensatory strategies. Then an eye-head coordination test with the infrared goggles will pinpoint the cause of the disorder.
Using the evaluation results, an individualized treatment plan will be developed. For positional vertigo a simple treatment is all that is required. For balance disorders, exercise-based treatment that includes specific head, body, and eye exercises to be performed both in the therapy setting and at home may be required. These exercises are designed to retrain the brain to recognize and process signals from the vestibular system and coordinate them with information from the eyes and muscles and joints. This often involves desensitizing the balance system to movements that provoke symptoms, and increasing home-based activities and exercise in order to strengthen muscles.