What's assessed in vestibular therapy?- The 7 Big 7 Questions about Vestibular Therapy and Dizziness

Join us with Dr. Julie Gray, vestibular physical therapist as we go through the 7 big questions about vestibular therapy. Day 5 question 5 in our series is "what's assessed in vestibular therapy?"
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Dr. Julie Gray, PT is a vestibular physical therapist and owner of Piton Physical Therapy, a mobile vestibular therapy clinic serving clients in the Jackson New Jersey area or anywhere in New Jersey through telemedicine. Our mission is to empower individuals with pain, dizziness, and imbalance live a better balanced and active life from the comfort of home!
If you or someone you love is dealing with dizziness, imbalance or concussion symptoms, we would love to connect to know how to help serve you on your journey to wellness!
Call/Text: 732-691-4681
Email: [e-mail]
www.pitonpt.com/
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Facebook: @pitonphysicaltherapy
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Be sure to check out our other videos in this series:
Question 1: what is vestibular?: • Video
Question 2: what is vestibular therapy?: • What is vestibular the...
Question 3: what conditions does vestibular therapy treat?: • What symptoms does ves...
Question 4: how are vestibular conditions diagnosed?: • How are Vestibular Con...
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Day 5, question 5 What’s assessed in vestibular therapy?
* Vestibular therapy looks at all the systems of your balance. A lot of the symptoms relating to dizziness, imbalance and vertigo come from an imbalance or miscommunication between your eyes, inner ear, and joint sense and how all of those signals are communicating to your brain.
* So the first system is your eyes. Our balance uses information from our eyes. For example, if I see a crack in a hole in the ground, my body knows that I need to navigate around it. When performing assessments on your eyes are looking at your eyes and how they are moving, tracking, scanning, and converging to focus on an object. Problems here can from macular degeneration, glaucoma, or even a head injury like a concussion which can change how my eyes are functioning together.
* When assessing inner ear function, we utilize infrared goggles. The eyes are a gateway to your inner ear through their nerves. By eliminating room light, and recording the eye motion in certain head positions, we can detect specific details about the health and potential problems in your inner ear. We will look at the response of your eyes while we move your head into different positions, based on how your eyes respond. It provides us information about where the problem may be coming from, whether from an inner ear problem or maybe someplace else like your brain from after sustaining a concussion.
* When assessing joint sense, we commonly perform balance tasks on different surfaces biasing different aspects of the balance systems by having you perform certain tasks on different surfaces with your eyes open or eyes closed. By changing the surface conditions and changing what your eyes are seeing, we can bias the different aspects of your balance system and see where the area of weakness may be coming from. Clients who struggle with weakness in their joint sense may feel more imbalance often feel more challenged on uneven surfaces like grass or sand. As part of your joint sense assessment, we also will screen your cervical spine, or neck, we mentioned in a previous video that we get specific information from our neck to our inner ear. Just like we get information about feet about the surface we are walking on, our head and neck help to coordinate and provide information about our eyes and inner ear about where our head is in space. Clients with weakness or stiffness in their neck might struggle with dizziness and light-headedness with head movements
That wraps up day 5 on our 7 day journey to learning about vestibular therapy. Next up we will talk about a two part question, will vestibular therapy make my symptoms worse and how long will it take me to feel better?

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