Are you experiencing spells of dizziness and nausea? You might be suffering from vertigo. Although this condition is not necessarily dangerous, it can seriously impact your quality of life. It’s hard to go about your day and do everything you need to when it feels like the world is spinning and like you may be sick. Fortunately, chiropractors can help relieve your vertigo in a variety of very effective ways.
What Is Vertigo?
Vertigo is a sensation of feeling off kilter and like either you are spinning or like the world is spinning, even though you are not.
What Causes Vertigo?
Many things can cause vertigo. In most cases, inner ear problems are the culprit. Vertigo can stem from migraines, Meniere’s disease, labyrinthitis (an issue usually related to infection), head or neck injury, brain problems, car accidents, and more. The most common cause of vertigo is a condition called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV).
BPPV happens when the miniscule calcium carbonate crystals from your inner ear organ end up in the canals of your inner ear. This can affect how your inner ear communicates with your brain, ergo, impacting your balance and creating a spinning sensation.
Symptoms
Vertigo is most commonly associated with a spinning sensation. Its most common symptoms are feeling like you are spinning, tilting, swaying, unbalanced, and generally unsteady. These are not its sole symptoms, though. Other effects of vertigo include: nausea, vomiting, jerking eye movement, headaches, ringing in your ears, and sweating. You may experience any of this symptoms for anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.
Treatment Options
Vertigo usually goes away by itself within a few weeks. This is because typically, your brain will be able to adapt to how your inner ear changed and switch maintenance of balance to other areas. Sometimes, though, it can last for months or even years. Luckily, it’s a treatable condition, so you don’t need to worry about just waiting for it to fade on its own.
What treatment looks like for you depends on the cause of your vertigo. They can range from physical therapy, to head and body movements designed to restore balance, like what a chiropractor can perform, to medication which will help with the nausea or inflammation, to surgery in the worst of cases, which are when the vertigo is an indicator of a serious problems such as a brain tumor.
How A Chiropractor Can Help
If you suffer from vertigo, a chiropractor can help. Chiropractors have a number of treatments from spinal manipulations to head and neck movements such as that doctors will also do which can alleviate your vertigo.
Chiropractors specialize in the spine and the central nervous system. This means that chiropractic adjustments can improve how the inner ear and the brain communicate, which can then improve your balance and reduce that spinning sensation. Chiropractic adjustments are also great for reducing inflammation, which can affect your inner ear, especially if you recently had an ear infection.
The Epley maneuver is a proven method to treat vertigo, especially if it is BPPV. This treatment method affects the vestibular system, which is what maintains our balance. If our vestibular system is off, our balance is off. This maneuver is non-invasive, and involves moving and holding your head in certain positions for a set period of time. The reason why this works to treat vertigo is because it uses gravity to allow the crystals in your inner ear to move into another position, which can resolve the problem.
The effectiveness of the Epley maneuver depends on if there are multiple crystals in the ear or if the problem is in both ears. In this case, repetition over the course of a few days should fix the issue. This maneuver can be challenging sometimes, because vertigo can cause nausea, and this head movement can make you nauseous, which makes it hard to hold a set position for the designated time frame.
This maneuver has proven to be effective for over 90% of people who suffered from vertigo, and is an extremely safe method of treatment.
As you can see, there are a number of ways that a chiropractor can help your vertigo. You don’t need to just wait for it to go away on its own. Treatments can help get rid of it faster.
Do You Need Help With Vertigo?
Here at Health And Wellness Clinic, we offer professional chiropractic care. If you’re suffering from vertigo, we can help you. We also offer a range of other treatments to get your body working properly again in a natural way. For any questions or to schedule an appointment, please contact us at Health And Wellness Clinic today!
