The vestibular disorder occurs when the vestibular system is damaged. This can be caused by the natural aging process, an infection, or an injury to the head or neck.
Vestibular disorder symptoms can take a toll on a person’s daily life and while there are treatment options available, it is hard to find an effective natural treatment for reducing or eliminating vestibular disorder symptoms.
What are Vestibular Disorder Symptoms?
Symptoms associated with the vestibular disorder can take a toll on someone’s daily life for a reason. These symptoms affect many natural functions including vision, balance, hearing, and thinking. The following is a list of common vestibular disorder symptoms:
- Changes in Hearing – Changes in hearing that may occur due to a vestibular disorder include hearing loss, distorted or fluctuating hearing, tinnitus (a ringing, whistling, roaring, or whooshing phantom noise that is only heard by you), and sensitivity to loud noises or environments.
- Changes in Vision – For this vestibular disorder symptom, one may experience a disturbance in their vision. This means their visual field could seem bouncy or jiggly as they move their head. Double vision may also occur and sometimes these visual disturbances can cease when the head is kept still. This vestibular disorder symptom usually encourages the patient to seek out an eye care professional before realizing it could be connected to a vestibular disorder.
- Vertigo and Dizziness – The vestibular system includes parts of the inner ear and the brain that help your eye movements and balance. When your sense of balance is interrupted, vertigo can occur and make you feel as if the environment around you is spinning or that you are moving while being still. This vestibular disorder symptom can make you feel nauseous and encourage you to stay still to help stop the false sense of movements.
- Balance and Spatial Orientation – This vestibular disorder symptom can make you feel the need to hold onto something nearby to help keep your balance or you may find it difficult to walk in a straight line. This can make you seem clumsy and cause you to stumble often. Maintaining proper posture may also be difficult as the head tilts to the side.
- Cognitive Changes – Cognitive changes can occur due to a vestibular disorder. Remember, the vestibular system does include part of the brain and the brain can be affected if the vestibular system is damaged. This vestibular disorder symptom can change how you take in information. It can make it difficult for you to understand conversations and concentrate. You can experience mental/physical fatigue, forgetfulness, confusion, disorientation, and short-term memory lapses. This can take a huge toll on how you react to stressful situations and can play a significant part in how you could change psychologically.
- Psychological Changes – While living with vestibular disorder symptoms, psychological changes can occur due to how it affects your daily life. Living with these symptoms that limit your physical and cognitive activity can cause anxiety, depression, panic, and social isolation. Over time it can affect one’s self-confidence and reduce one’s self-reliance and self-esteem.
What Treatments are Used to Treat Vestibular Disorder Symptoms?
The most common treatments for reducing vestibular disorder symptoms are exercises, diet changes, medication, and surgery. Below is a list of how these treatments work for patients who want to reduce their vestibular disorder symptoms:
- Exercises – A natural treatment for helping with vestibular disorder symptoms is a home-based exercise. These home exercises are assigned by a physical or occupational therapist and are to be performed at a prescribed pace. Included with these home exercises is a progressive fitness program. The progressive fitness program helps to increase energy and reduce stress.
- Vestibular Rehabilitation Therapy – Vestibular rehabilitation therapy (or VRT) treats a patient by giving them specific exercises for their head, body, and eyes. These exercises are made to help train the brain in how to recognize and process signals from the vestibular system and coordinate them with their vision and perception/awareness of position and body movement.
- Diet Adjustments – Depending on the patient, adjustments to their diets can be quite useful. Diet changes such as caffeine intake, use of nicotine, and alcohol consumption can make a difference in their vestibular disorder symptoms.
- Medication – Depending on the severity of a patient’s vestibular disorder symptoms, different treatments for medication are used. An acute phase that lasts up to five days rely on prescriptions that help reduce motion sickness and nausea.
- Surgery – If medication does not work in alleviating vestibular disorder symptoms, the patient may be recommended a corrective or a destructive surgery – depending on their case. A corrective surgery helps repair the inner ear function and stabilize it while a destructive surgery tries to stop the production of sensory information or prevent the transmission from your inner ear to the brain. Like all treatment options, surgery should be considered a last resort as it will make permanent changes to how your body naturally functions.
While these treatment options are widely used, they are also focused solely on the vestibular disorder symptoms. However, there is an all-natural treatment available to those who want their body to heal and repair from the inside out by targeting what could be causing your symptoms.
A Natural Treatment That Targets the Cause of my Vestibular Disorder Symptoms?
For years upper cervical adjustments have been used to help maintain a healthy upper cervical spine and brain stem function. Your upper cervical spine protects your brain stem and allows proper communication to flow through the brain to the body so it may continue to function properly and heal and repair itself after injury or infection.
Vestibular disorders affect the inner ear and parts of the brain, and it also sits very close to the atlas vertebra in your upper cervical spine. A misalignment here can compress against the brain stem and surrounding nerves, affecting soft tissue and disrupting brain to body communication.
What happens here is the body becomes unable to effectively repair, heal, and fight off infection. If left untreated, the area will weaken causing more issues throughout the body to occur as if it can affect regular bodily functions such as breathing, sleeping, blood pressure, and eating.
The vessels, nerves, and structure of the ear can be affected by an upper cervical misalignment – causing changes in how your body perceives balance and lead to improper drainage that causes ear infections. A lot of vestibular disorder symptoms can be caused by this misalignment.
The purpose of the upper cervical chiropractor is to realign the upper cervical spine, releasing pressure placed on the brain stem and surrounding nerves. This encourages brain and body communication to return to normal and to begin the repair and healing process.
Since this treatment relies on giving back the body’s ability to naturally heal, repair, and function as it should – patients who have already tried medication and surgery still report upper cervical as being effective in treating their vestibular disorder symptoms.
If you or a loved one is suffering from vestibular disorder symptoms and are looking to find relief, upper cervical adjustments are gentle, safer than medication and surgery, and allows your body to strengthen naturally instead of being altered to overlook the symptoms or forced to ignore them with medication or surgery.