Chiropractic Care For Dizziness and Vertigo
If you’ve experienced vertigo you already know it can be debilitating, in fact, it can be quite troubling for those who experience it. We all get a little dizzy sometimes, whether it’s because we stood up too fast or we looked at an optical illusion for too long, but vertigo seems to be much harsher and longer lasting than any of these other brief experiences.
Vertigo is characterized by dizziness combined with a feeling of movement or a spinning sensation, even when you are standing perfectly still. Sometimes headaches, nausea, and fatigue accompany these dizzy feelings. There are a few different ways vertigo can begin, most of them dealing with the way your inner ear and brain communicate. Because of the neurological connection, chiropractic care has been shown to help alleviate vertigo symptoms.
Vertigo is a common symptom that chiropractors see on a regular basis from their patients who might have suffered a recent neck trauma, but more commonly it could be caused by damage or a disruption in your vestibular system, or inner ears, such as a recent cold/ear infection, or pressure changes.
The good news, chiropractic adjustments have been proven to alleviate a specific type of vertigo called cervical vertigo. This type of vertigo is caused by stuck spinal joints in the cervical spine from those recent neck injuries or strains and can result in a decrease in communication being sent from the nerves in your neck to your brain. This misinformation may cause you to feel dizzy. Some specific adjustments realign the joints and vertebrae in the cervical spine, correcting the nerve pathways and allowing for clearer communication.
A more common type of vertigo, benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV), is due to the movement of crystals around the inner ear. These crystals can make you sensitive to gravity andd they can shift into other parts of the vestibular pathways, altering your center of balance and briefly making you feel dizzy in certain positions. To help with BPPV specifically, chiropractors will often use the Epley maneuver, which maneuvers your head into different positions to reposition the crystals inside the inner ear.
If you suffer from vertigo, you might want to get evaluated to see what treatment options might help your situation.