Vestibular Rehabilitation
The inner ear’s vestibular system is your neurological foundation.
Without proper vestibular input, you cannot locate yourself in the world, and your neurological foundation crumbles. Vestibular dysfunction can be found lurking within virtually any neurological condition.
Vestibular therapy helps people with dizziness and balance problems restore function by helping them remap their concept of where they exist in the world. If you have been suffering from brain injuries, vertigo, balance problems, headaches, or neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders, vestibular rehabilitation may help you turn things around and help you heal.
Vestibular rehabilitation has helped people struggling with everything from dizziness to depression, from brain fog to balance problems, and from concussions to cognitive issues. Vestibular rehabilitation has helped people take back their health and get back to living the lives they love.
What Is Vestibular Rehabilitation?
The vestibular system is your neurological foundation. The primary function of the brain is to localize the body in space so it can respond to the environment. It does this using a series of maps, created by inputs from the eyes, feedback from muscles and joints, and signals from the inner ear receptors of the vestibular system.
The vestibular map is the only one that gives your brain the series of three-dimensional coordinates it needs to create your concept of space. It creates the primary unconscious self-concept upon which all of your other maps are superimposed. Without proper vestibular input, your neurological foundation crumbles. Vestibular dysfunction can be found lurking within virtually any neurological condition.
How Does Vestibular Rehabilitation Help You?
People in the fitness industry spend a great deal of time inaccurately describing your “core,” as your abdominal muscles. Your true neurological core is your vestibular system, consisting of your inner ear receptors, your vestibular nerves, and the brainstem, cerebellar and brain structures they stimulate, as well as the pathways they fire.
Your vestibular inner ear receptors are constantly sensing your head position in relation to gravity and how your head is moving. They constantly fire down through your vestibulospinal pathway, which is the fastest conducting system in your entire neuraxis. This pathway fires down to your ankles and back up through your spine at a speed measured in milliseconds. It contracts all of your stabilizing muscles to resist any shift in your center of mass, in order to prevent injuries and falls.
Your vestibular system also fires up at the same instant through the medial longitudinal fasciculus pathway to reflexively move your eyes in the opposite direction of head movement, so you can keep your eyes fixated on the visual world as you move. Without proper function of these reflexes, every time you move your head you would have no idea where you are in space, and no ability to stabilize yourself from falling. Impairment of these reflexes is thus seen in just about every condition that involves balance, dizziness, vertigo, and disorientation. Vestibular problems are also often seen in chronic pain states and conditions that involve repetitive reinjury.
The vestibular receptors from the inner ear fire through the vestibular nerves into the brainstem, and directly integrate with areas involved in control of the autonomic nervous system. This involves regulation of heart rate, blood flow, digestion, and stress responses. Impaired vestibular function can potentially be involved any condition involving the autonomic system, ranging from dysautonomia to digestive problems, and anxiety disorders to arrhythmias. Many neurodegenerative disorders can lead to problems with vestibular function. As this is the first sensory system to develop in utero, vestibular impairment is seen in many neurodevelopmental disorders.
It provides the foundational awareness necessary for all forms of motor function, and vestibular impairment is found in movement disorders, coordination problems, and sports injuries. We almost always see some level of vestibular impairment in post-concussion syndrome and traumatic brain injuries. We are also regularly seeing vestibular problems in our post-COVID-19 syndrome patients.
What To Expect
Vestibular rehabilitation can take many different forms depending on your condition and your unique set of circumstances. It generally involves directly stimulating a specific set of vestibular reflexes that have been shown by your diagnostic testing to be problematic.
The exercises can include things like repositioning maneuvers designed to float inner ear crystals back where they belong, by holding your head in specific positions until your symptoms subside, while you wear infrared goggles that track your eye movements.
They can involve gaze stabilization techniques where you perform specific patterns of head movement while you keep your eyes still on targets, or exercises where specific head movements are performed immediately before you engage in an eye exercise. You may stand on specialized force plates that track your center of mass while you perform exercises that have you hit targets on a screen by shifting your balance. You may wear a head-mounted laser and be asked to move your eyes and head to track a moving target.
Pioneering Functional Neurology Care Across Europe for Over 35 Years.
Kim has been helping people recover from complicated neurological conditions, such as Concussions and Traumatic Brain Injuries, Dizziness and Vertigo, Dysautonomia, and Movement Disorders through innovative diagnostics and customized brain-based solutions for 35 years.
