If you have ever been dizzy or lost your sense of balance you will know how scary this can be. Actually, I find that it is a common underlying cause of anxiety. If you can imagine you are standing on the edge of a cliff and your friend comes up behind you and grabs you and pretends to push you, you would get a shock catecholamines and cortisol would be released, your heart rate would rise – or to put it another way it would raise your anxiety. So, if you are walking around every day with balance issues or dizziness your levels of anxiety are going to be much higher.

Firstly, I want to say that if you have new symptoms of dizziness or balance problems get them checked out immediately especially if they are accompanied by hearing loss and/or tinnitus (ringing in the ears). They can be signs of serious health problems such as Meniere’s disease, cardiovascular problems or neurological conditions.

The term dizziness is vague and means different things to different people but what it really means is either the room is spinning around you or you feel like you are spinning in the room. This is also called vertigo but is often confused with light headedness, or other sensations of disequilibrium caused by motion of you or things around you causing you to lose balance.

Excluding the serious health issues that can cause dizziness and balance problems there are 3 common causes. The first is called Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, which is a bit of a mouthful so is shortened to BPPV, the second is vestibular pathologies and the third is migraine headache.

Two of these BPPV and vestibular issues can be helped very simply with eye exercises or a simple treatment but you have to correctly diagnose the problem to know which will work.

BPPV

This is caused by small crystals getting caught in part of the inner ear that is involved with balance. This most often happens when a person is lying down and rolling over in bed or with changes in body position it has a short duration about 30 seconds and true rotatory vertigo (you feel the room spin). This can be diagnosed by looking at eye movements that are known as nystagmus with your body in a particular position.

If BPPV is correctly diagnosed in 90% of cases it can be treated in one session. It can sometimes reoccur months or years later but can again be treated with same maneuverer and a similar success rate.

Vestibular Issues

These are also diagnosed by looking at eye movements but you need to use some special equipment that allows us to look at eyes in complete darkness. These are infra-red frenzel goggles. Using this equipment allows us to differentiate between vestibular issues and BPPV and also different types of vestibular problem namely peripheral and central vestibulopathy. Central vestibulopathy requires further investigation to find the cause but peripheral vestibular issues are often caused by acute infection (infection of the vestibular nerves) that can persist long after a previous infection. Peripheral vestibular issues respond very well to eye exercises that if done for number of weeks often completely remove the dizziness.

Functional Medicine assessment can help us to improve dizziness and balance issues for those who do not have straight forward cases.  In order help someone in this situation a fuller under standing of metabolic factors, food sensitivities and and other immune reactivity it is possible to help people improve not only their balance but overall health and well being.  It may also be a better approach for those who are having issues with balance due to migraines.