It's common to see people with vertigo and balance problems in our practice. These patients have generally been experiencing these problems for several weeks or months, or even years in some cases. They have therefore gone through a classic treatment pathway, from general practitioner to ENT specialist.
So patients “know” where their problem comes from, and repeat what the medical profession has told them:
It's because of the cervical vertebrae
It's the crystals
It's vascular
As for solutions, they are prescribed either Tanganil® or vestibular re-education sessions, of which the “chair” is the ultimate instrument of torture, and very often to no avail.
What is dizziness?
To treat vertigo, we first need to identify how balance management works. I propose to do this within a broader spectrum than is commonly accepted.
We are a species that moves upright, throwing us off balance at every step. As a result, we need to maintain correct muscle tone as we move, so that we don't fall, but also maintain it in all situations.
To do this, we have 3 independent tools that work together:
The first is proprioception. This is the system for managing body tone in response to sensory information from the musculoskeletal system.
At any given moment, our brain receives information about muscular, tendon and tissue tension, correlating it with the cerebral mapping of our body. In this way, we “feel” our body and its posture. Efferent control adjusts this muscle tone to correct posture.
The aim here is to keep the center of gravity correctly positioned between the feet (in the middle of the sustentation triangle) while consuming as little energy as possible to maintain it.
The second is the vestibular system, i.e. the canals of the inner ear. These canals (3 per ear) are lined with cilia that send information to the brain when the crystals in the canals move during head movements (rotation, tilt and flexion/extension). So, even with our eyes closed, we know where the top is from the bottom...
The third is sight. Our gaze must be kept horizontal to maintain a horizon line. This gaze relies on the verticals and horizontals of the environment to find its bearings in the surrounding space.
What are the links between vertigo and the brain?
So we have 3 tools that feed the brain with information from inside and outside.
Our brain also manages a host of other environmental and internal information. It does this through the limbic system, the nervous system in charge of sensations and emotions. It is our body's conductor.
It's also responsible for vertigo. Whether they're rotatory, ebriated, positional, continuous or occasional (we'll leave aside here inflammatory origins of the vestibular nerve, or neurological disorders such as tumors or post-operative sequelae, which are lesional etiologies).
Each person's perception is divided into 2 parts. An internal perception that can be likened to our thoughts, our inner life, which is a reflection of our emotions. Our ideas and mental images are directly correlated with our moods and emotions, creating or being induced by bodily sensations that may not be correlated with the moment experienced.
We all experience this when we imagine an upcoming situation creating stress or well-being when we are in a neutral environment. These bodily sensations have nothing to do with our direct environment, but are a creation of our limbic system. If the mental load is not too heavy, our nervous system is able to handle all the information at once. But when the information load is too heavy, particularly when we're tired, our tolerance threshold is lowered.
As a result, we are no longer able to manage all internal and environmental information.
We find ourselves in the same situation as when we read in the car. Our eyes see lines and words, while our bodies perceive road movements that are not related to our vision.
How to treat vertigo?
Vertigo is simply a disconnection between bodily perception and visual perception of the environment.
Our brain is focused on internal sensory information that doesn't correlate with what our eyes see. This difference and contradiction in afferent information leads to a bug in the brain (vertigo) which no longer knows where to give priority, resulting in an erroneous bodily response (loss of balance).
I've treated many people suffering from vertigo. Thanks to Neurolink, they have all regained their balance (except those whose aetiology is lesional neurological damage - what's destroyed is destroyed). The most striking patient was a 60-year-old woman who had been suffering from vertigo for 25 years!
After giving her the Neurolink Process, and explaining to her how to “focus” on her environment, look at it and pay attention to it, she was able to permanently resolve her vertigo in the very first session.
This is exactly what happens when a patient does the chair exercise at the ENT. While he's being mobilized in all directions, he's asked to stare at a point of light - in other words, to focus simply on his environment and not on his internal sensations.
Dizziness is not related to cervical problems!
Sometimes, however, the loss of vascular adaptation when changing position can lead to a loss of blood and therefore oxygen to the brain, causing a dizzy sensation which is in fact a vagal malaise rather than vertigo.
In short, being attentive and focused on our environment is the only thing that matters, since we have to adapt and move around in it.
If I could draw a parallel with hearing, it's like hearing and listening. We hear sounds, but if we're not paying attention, we're not listening. Seeing and looking are the same thing: we see our environment because light reaches the eye, but if we don't look, our gaze is in a void and our brain is somewhere else inside!
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