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Get the latest hearing loss news First name. Last name. Email address. Confirm email. This website uses cookies to improve your experience. Read More Accept. Close Privacy Overview This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. However, when you are asked to close your eyes, you may find it quite difficult to stay standing upright.
To figure out what's causing dizziness, a medical provider must take a thorough medical history and exam. If you have recently changed or added a prescription to your daily routine, be sure to ask your physician about the possibility of dizziness as a side effect. The same is true of alcohol and caffeine—both can interact with your medications. There are a wide array of tests a doctor may use to evaluate dizziness, and they may be performed by a primary care doctor, a physical therapist, cardiologist or neurologist.
In some cases, especially if you also experience hearing loss, you may undergo a hearing test. The cochlea, your hearing organ, is contained within the same bony structure as your balance organ. An ABR test non-invasively records brainstem responses to sound stimuli. The brain waves are collected while you rest comfortably with your eyes closed.
The presence or absence of hearing loss or auditory brainstem anomalies will provide clues to the physician about the cause of your symptoms.
Another common test for balance is VNG, or videonystagmography. Usually performed by an ENT physician or an audiologist , a VNG test uses video cameras to record eye movements while a patient tracks a visual stimulus, is moved into different positions and while the ear canals are stimulated with warm and cool air or water.
This test gives a broad picture of whether the underlying issue is related to the inner ear or not. Appropriate treatment for dizzy symptoms will depend on the underlying cause, so it is important that you see a physician. Your doctor might prescribe something to help the dizzy symptoms temporarily, for example. When the cause of the dizziness is determined and treated, the symptom will often go away.
For BPPV, dizziness can be treated by a simple head positioning maneuver. Many other disorders can be treated with medication, surgery, diet, lifestyle changes or some combination of these. There are also physical therapists who specialize in vestibular rehabilitation, which is a treatment for balance disorders that gradually retrains the brain to compensate for lost sensory input from the balance system.
People with chronic episodes of dizziness may develop anxiety or even panic attacks. This is because dizziness is a very scary situation in which you may feel not just miserable and nauseated , but helpless.
More: Why anxiety often accompanies balance disorders, and what to do about it. If you experience any dizziness symptoms that don't go away, you should talk to your physician or a hearing care provider so the underlying cause can be determined and the problem remediated. Joy Victory has extensive experience editing consumer health information.
Her training in particular has focused on how to best communicate evidence-based medical guidelines and clinical trial results to the public. She strives to make health content accurate, accessible and engaging to the public. Read more about Joy. More information about hearing loss , hearing aids , hearing aid brands and assistive devices. Your inner ear has three canals that sense different types of movement: up and down, side to side, turning in any direction and tilting. These canals are filled with fluid; within that fluid are floating membranes with tiny cells that send signals to your brain.
That special sensory information, combined with what you see and feel, helps you navigate the physical world. The brain ultimately interprets all of this incoming sensory information and translates it into coordination, balance and movement. If those incoming signals are thrown off, you can experience dizziness, nausea or a feeling that the world is spinning. Several different conditions can cause your inner ear—balance system to become off-kilter, but thankfully they can be managed with help from a doctor.
Vertigo is really the name of the symptom describing this dizzy, off-balance feeling, but something called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo BPPV is a diagnosis in itself. With BPPV, small calcium crystals in your inner ear become dislodged, causing your brain to receive the wrong signals about your movements.
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