Dizziness Depot

Dr. Brady Workman is back this week with a post inspired by a patient we saw in the clinic last week. Dizziness and vertigo are common symptoms of patients within primary care clinics, with dizziness accounting for 2.5% and vertigo for around 1% of all patient visits. The majority of these symptoms are related to vestibular system dysfunction; however, other

 Paving the way isn’t always easy. Today’s post started as a Thanksgiving-themed “Thank you” note to some of our vestibular pioneers, but as I researched the backgrounds of these pioneers, I was struck by some of the trials, tribulations, and misadventures some of them encountered. Let’s start with Robert Barany. He won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in

I am about seven weeks out from an acute vestibular neuritis. From a clinician’s point of view, this is a textbook case of acute vestibular syndrome that I have seen hundreds of times. This time, as the patient, my experience has been predictable in some ways, and hard to explain in other ways. The first thing we do when we

Head Trauma and Dizziness This week, we have another contribution by my doctoral student, Brady Workman, B.S.. Brady has been scanning old posts and trying to fill in gaps regarding areas I have not covered in the past few years. Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is an increasingly prevalent public health concern, with 2.8 million people requiring medical assistance due to

This is what it looks like Today’s post is a two week follow up on my report of my personal experience with Vestibular Neuritis. I came in to my office at 48 hours into the episode to document the obvious nystagmus, measure the effects of fixation and gaze angle, and measure functional changes in my Vestibular Ocular Reflex (VOR). As

Practice What You Preach Last Sunday, I had an up close and personal encounter with Vestibular Neuritis. It hit suddenly, somewhere between buttering the toast and sitting down to breakfast. I was completely symptom free 2 minutes earlier, buzzing around my kitchen making eggs and pouring coffee. I noticed a little lightheaded feeling and blurred vision as I carried my

This is Part II of a post by my doctoral student, Brady Workman, B.S. Last time he described what VEMP’s are actually measuring. This week, he focuses on clinical applications, basically, “What are they good for?” (VEMP) Vestibular Evoked Myogenic Potentials: Now what do we do with them? In the last post, we briefly talked about what VEMPs are and

What are they? This week’s post is brought to you by my current doctoral student, Brady Workman. Brady is working towards his degree at East Tennessee State University, known for a strong vestibular program. He is teaching me a few things about VEMPs. Here’s Brady: Vestibular evoked myogenic potentials (VEMPs) are measurements originating from the otolith organs of the vestibular

It’s not dead yet! Reading over a recent article published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine that compares the effectiveness of meclizine versus diazepam for treating vertigo (including BPPV), I was reminded of that cliché scene in so many horror movies. The bad guy is finally dead. He has an axe in his chest, or something equally unsurvivable (is that

There was an interesting article published by CNN last week about two brothers involved in a spectacular fall when the scaffolding they were on gave way. One brother was killed on impact, while the other survived very serious injuries. Most of us are not at risk for falling 472 feet from defective scaffolding, but we are all at risk for