In our last post, we discussed the process of compensation to vestibular injury, and how important vision is to the process. There are visual tricks you can use to help finish the process of compensation, and we’ll review these here.
After the nystagmus has quieted down, which can take from a few days to a few weeks, if you have a lot of damage to an inner ear, you will still be left with some dizziness. This will only happen when your head moves, not when staying still. When turning your head very quickly, you will notice that the room will shift or jiggle like a bad video. When one ear is affected, this will mostly happen when you turn toward the bad ear. If both ears are affected, turning in any direction will set this off. This visual shift, called oscillopsia, is different from nystagmus. Nystagmus causes the room to spin, while oscillopsia causes the room to appear to slide past your eyes very briefly and only when your head moves.
This oscillopsia is the most common reason for failure to completely compensate to vestibular injury. The reason this happens is that the inner ear is critical to allow your eyes to remain focused whenever you quickly turn your head. Your eyes can follow well enough to stay focused at slow speeds if you have an inner ear injury, but at high accelerations this ability is outstripped. Your eyes end up being dragged across the visual scene as your head turns, blurring everything. Since the ear is injured, no further improvement can be expected in this reflex. However, you can still improve your symptom.
There is a trick you must learn to recover. Some people learn to do this automatically, but everyone else benefits from being taught the trick. It’s very easy. You must learn to blink when making a rapid head turn. This is outlined in our video and discussion here. When you blink, you can’t see the room slide by, and you can learn to time the blink so it happens every time you make a quick head turn. You won’t even notice you’re doing this. By practicing blink turns, your balance can be completely restored, as if the injury never happened.
Next month we will discuss other ways you can compensate to balance injuries.
Ending Vertigo Today 