Treating Vertigo Attacks

In today’s video we’ll be quickly discussing what triggers vertigo and how to treat vertigo attacks. Enjoy!

Transcription
Hi I’m Dr. Sanders with Voyage Direct Primary Care. Today we’re going to talk about vertigo. My sweet wife Shauna woke up this morning and the whole world was spinning on her. When she wakes up she’s laying on her side, and she gets up quickly, rolls over and touches her alarm clock, and she threw off some of the crystals in her inner ear called the cochlea, and she gave herself a bad case of what’s called Benign Parasichsmal Provisional Vertigo. It’s just what it sounds like, it’s benign so it’s not a huge deal, but it can make you feel really bad. So she’s had symptoms of…

Shauna: Dizziness, vertigo, I feel like I’m going to fall over when I try to walk someplace especially, it gets worse. When I move my head in different positions and sometimes I’m nauseous as well.

Dr. Sanders: So I wanted to show you a quick maneuver that is curative a large percentage of the time. So let’s go through that real quick.

So you just have them sitting up, and then you have them kind of quickly lie back, and turn their head towards me and extend their neck, and you kind of support their neck in that endeavor. So let’s go ahead and go through it, go ahead Shauna. 

So you support their neck as they lay it back and I’m holding her neck up, and often it will bring on a sense of dizziness, sometimes they’ll throw up so definitely have a barf bag ready. And you’ll see her eyes will start to twitch, and it gives her a real bad sensation of dizziness.. If you can see her eyes twitching there. And that just re-calibrates those stones in her inner ear, and so the goal is to shift them in a place that’s more functional so she doesn’t have the vertigo as bad.

So I usually hold them there until their symptoms go away, have they gone away?

Shauna: Yep

Dr. Sanders: And then I’ll have them sit back up, and then sometimes even sitting back up causes the symptoms to get worse as well.

Shauna: Yep, I don’t think my eyes are twitching but I’m definitely feeling a little dizzy.

Dr. Sanders: Okay, and then so usually it’s one side that’s affected, I’ll take them to both sides and just see which side is the worst and I’ll do it several times to that one side.

That’s it, this is Voyage Direct Primary Care, I’m Dr. Sanders helping people muscles through vertigo. If you have symptoms of imbalance or proprioception loss or different things like that, it could be other things as well, so if you do have an episode of a vertigo spinning-type sensation, make sure you talk to your doctor about it. There are several different things it could be as well. Thank you and thanks for listening.