The resultant spinning sensation usually lasts only a minute or so, but changes in head position can bring it on multiple times a day - when you bend down to empty the dishwasher, lean back in a dentist’s chair, or merely roll over in bed. John Oghalai, an otolaryngologist at Stanford University.īut when they find their vertigo gone with a simple test and a non-pharmacological treatment, “they love it,” he said.ī.P.P.V., as it’s known, occurs when the tiny calcium carbonate crystals of your inner ear loosen and migrate into one of the semicircular canals, where their presence signals the brain that you’re moving when you’re not. “When you tell patients that all you have to do is move your head in a few different directions, they think you’re crazy,” said Dr.
Often, patients can perform the maneuver at home. When the vertigo comes back months or years later, as it tends to do, it can be vanquished again. Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo is a different story.Īlthough it can be terrifying and tormenting, a trained physical therapist, audiologist or otolaryngologist can usually dispatch its symptoms on the spot with a simple repositioning maneuver. So many of the ailments that plague older adults can be managed but not cured. Amberger had the most common kind of vertigo. Two weeks later, still feeling as if he had a hangover, he saw his primary care doctor, who finally explained that Mr.
But whenever a nurse or doctor asked him to sit up in bed, he had to reach for the rails. If he kept still, the sensation abated, “but as soon as I moved, it was a wild merry-go-round.”įrightened, he called 911 and spent a day and a night at a hospital, undergoing thousands of dollars in tests - CT scan, M.R.I., ultrasound, blood work - that found nothing alarming. “It was the most disconcerting experience imaginable,” said Mr. The first time it happened, in 2011, Bob Amberger thought he might be having a stroke.Ī retired real estate agent and contractor in Modesto, Calif., he awoke one morning, started to climb out of bed and felt the room whirling around him.
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