Dizziness: Misdiagnosed and Mistreated

Dizziness is Hard to Diagnose

When people have dizziness as a complaint, it can be one of the most commonly misdiagnosed and mistreated conditions around. The challenge is that dizziness is a symptom that can be associated with lots of different conditions. Here’s a short list of conditions associated with dizziness:

Primary dizziness: Dizziness as a primary disease entity

• Positional vertigo (BPPV)
• Meniere’s disease

Secondary dizziness: Dizziness as a result of another problem

• Stroke
• Migraine
• Concussion
• Tumors
• Medications

On top of that, dizziness means something different to different people. Does your dizziness feel like spinning? Rocking? Feeling off balance? Light headedness? Sometimes the feeling of dizziness can be hard to describe because you just feel disoriented and lost in space.

All of these factors are important to help a doctor get the right diagnosis.

It means that a doctor has to take a good health history, perform the right bedside tests, and order the appropriate diagnostic testing to find out the cause of your dizziness. Without knowing what’s causing this feeling, then administering the right treatment can be a lucky guess at best, or make you more dizzy at worst.

It’s no wonder that people who have chronic vertigo and other balance issues often see their primary care doctor, neurologist, ENT, physical therapist, acupuncturist, and more looking for answers on how to get their world to stop moving.

Dizziness is Even Harder to Treat

Another challenge with dizziness patients is that medications don’t really do a good job of making the world stop moving. Many patients with chronic dizziness are placed on anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds, and drugs for nausea. The problem with that is that the patient may not be as nauseated, but their brains are not responding to their environment appropriately.

Dizziness after spinning on a bat is easy to explain, but what if the world is spinning when you’re standing still?

 Dizziness can also be treated by positional maneuvers like the Epley maneuver and head shaking exercises like gaze stability. Both are extremely effective when they are used appropriately, but can be useless if it’s performed on the wrong patient with the wrong diagnosis.

That’s why it’s so important to know what’s really going on with a patient. Many clinics will take any person with dizziness and just do some of these maneuvers even though the maneuvers may not be appropriate for the patient’s specific condition. In order to help a patient recover, we have to examine them closely to make sure that we have the right information to begin care.

Case Study: 

Recently we had a patient come in with dizziness and had been seeing an ENT for treatment. She was having problems feeling off balance for a while and it was made with head turning sometimes. She wasn’t experiencing a spinning type sensation, but just a sense of feeling out of sorts.

The doctor diagnosed her with benign paroxysmal positional vertigo or BPPV. It’s arguably the most common form of vertigo and is usually easily treated with a positional maneuver called the Epley maneuver. The doctor performed Epley and gave her some alternative maneuvers that she could do at home whenever she felt dizzy.

The problem was that the maneuver wasn’t changing anything. She tried doing the maneuvers for several weeks with no change. When she followed up with the doctor, the doctor told her there wasn’t anything else he could do and that some cases don’t respond.

Fortunately the patient found her way to our office through a referral from one of our patients who got really great results with balance problems

BPPV usually causes a spinning sensation that is really short lived. In many cases, doctors can diagnose BPPV with a test called the Dix-Halpike maneuver. You can look at this test below. If you have BPPV your eyes will start moving making a fast oscillating movement called nystagmus.

It’s this nystagmus when the inner ear moves the eyes that creates a feeling of spinning.

When this patient came in, we did a thorough history and found out that her “vertigo” didn’t have any spinning at all. She just felt disoriented and off balance. We performed the Dix-Halpike test and she had her eyes stayed solid.

So now we knew that she probably didn’t have BPPV, and that’s why the Epley maneuver didn’t work that well for her. It was time to figure out what other anatomy might be causing her problem.

We did a test called the smooth pursuit neck torsion test. It’s a test developed from patients who had dizziness after whiplash. It’s an indicator that the neck might be causing the eyes to move abnormally. You can see that test here below. In patients with neck problems, the eyes will start jumping instead of staying smooth.

Now that we knew the neck could be a problem, we started addressing the neck using the NUCCA procedure for structural correction.

Within 2 visits, the patient’s dizziness was about 80% gone. We have more work to do to help the neck heal, but with some time I think this patient will get back to normal.

Find the Cause, Deliver the Solution

So this isn’t an indictment on another professional. Lots of ENTs keep their focus on infections of the ear, nose, and throat. An ENT with a neurology background would probably have found the same thing and recommended physical therapy or chiropractic care.

The lesson here is that dizziness is complicated, and one treatment won’t solve all forms of dizziness. For any condition, we have to spend time with our patient, listen to their history, examine them thoroughly, and we can find a game plan to help them get back to normal.