Today, we are going to talk about another condition, and that is the dreaded Meniere’s disease. Maybe you have never heard about this before, but it is a very serious condition where a person deals with a triad of symptoms with their ears. What that triad consists of is tinnitus, or ringing in the ears, a loss of hearing, and vertigo, which is a problem with balance.
With conventional care, they really don’t have an answer for Meniere’s disease. The person starts coming in with these symptoms that I just mentioned, and the doctor looks at the ear, but he or she does not see anything wrong. They look at the external ear, they look at the internal ear, but nothing is wrong, so they just prescribe drugs to treat the symptoms.
The problem is that the drugs never get to the cause. They only mask the symptoms, leading to further degeneration and more problems down the road, not to mention addiction. Many times, Meniere’s patients get prescribed sedatives. When it gets so bad, literally all they want to do is just lay down, close their eyes, go to sleep, and not have to deal with these symptoms. Therefore, sedatives are prescribed, which are very, very addictive.
This path of conventional care can be very problematic when we look at the long-term effects of things. How can we get to the cause of Meniere’s disease, something we see in our office every day? It all has to do with the nervous system.
Like we already talked about, with conventional care, the doctor is going to look at the external and internal ear and see nothing wrong, yet the person is still having ringing in the ears. They are not hearing very well. They are dizzy. They have vertigo. What we found is that we need to look at the nervous system, specifically the vestibulocochlear nerve. This nerve travels from the internal ear all the way to the brainstem. This is the pathway for our ear and our brain to communicate. Essentially, what is going on is that there is nothing wrong with the ear. The ear is sending normal messages to the brainstem, but they are being interfered with at the level of the vestibulocochlear nerve, or the brainstem itself.
This interference is why the brain is interpreting these signals as ringing in the ears, hearing loss, and vertigo. It is all due to pressure on this vestibulocochlear nerve. If we can find a subluxation or a misalignment in one of the top two bones in the neck, and we can remove that misalignment, thus taking pressure off the brainstem and the vestibulocochlear nerve, we can start to get normal messages between the ear and the brainstem, allowing Meniere’s symptoms to go away. Now the ringing isn’t there anymore. Now they are hearing a lot louder. They do not need the hearing aid anymore. Their vertigo is better. They are not falling over. They are not getting sick.
Actually, one of the biggest symptoms we see with Meniere’s patients is dropping attacks. Drop attacks are debilitating symptoms where basically the triad of Meniere’s symptoms all comes at a rush at one time, and that person literally blacks out. Sometimes, they fall and injure themselves. They become nauseous and literally can’t do anything for hours on end. Then, it takes them days to recover. It is a terrible, terrible, disease. We just wish people knew about upper cervical care, so they could send themselves and their loved ones to get this care that benefits so many people, not just Meniere’s patients.