Ask the Chiropractor: Can Chiropractic Help with Dizziness?

In this episode of Ask the Chiropractor, Dr. Brant Hulsebus addresses a common question: can chiropractic care help with vertigo and dizziness? Dr. Hulsebus, a chiropractor based in Rockford, Illinois, and president of the Illinois Prairie State Chiropractic Association, discusses the various reasons why individuals might experience vertigo and dizziness. He explains how misalignments in the upper cervical spine (C1, C2, and C3) can lead to these symptoms and how chiropractic adjustments can potentially alleviate them. Dr. Hulsebus also outlines the diagnostic process, including the use of X-rays, and what patients can expect during their initial consultation and treatment. Tune in to learn more about the benefits of chiropractic care for managing vertigo and dizziness.

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

0:00

Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask the Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford Icehogs. Let's dive into it. Hi there, thanks for tuning in. So typically what happens is somebody leaves me a message about a question about care, chiropractic care, and they want me to answer as a chiropractor whether they should seek chiropractic care or not, whether or not chiropractic care could affect whatever they're dealing with. Today I got my phone call from a weird place. You see I'm also the president of the Illinois Prairie State Chiropractic Association, our chiropractic association here in Illinois, I call her every Friday, and I ask Julie, who's there in the main office, Is there anything I need to talk to any of our members about as a president? Did anybody call the main office and have an issue they want me to discuss? And she told me she's actually getting phone calls from people calling about whether or not chiropractic care can help with vertigo or dizziness. It's an unlikely source for my Topic for this week. Can chiropractic help avert a go or dizziness? So I want to thank the people who call the Illinois Prairie State Chiropractic Association But if you have a question for me, you go ahead and leave it after the podcast here Wherever you're watching or listening this leave a comment and I'll get it. But let's ask this. Let's answer this question, right? Can chiropractic care help avert a go or dizziness? Let me start off by saying first thing first. There are just tons and tons of Or reasons why people get vertigo and dizziness. There are tons of them. Can chiropractic help with all of them? That's a pretty bold statement, but chiropractic care can definitely help with some of them. And so how would I know if chiropractic care can help with some? How would I know if I'm a candidate? What should I be looking for? That's a very good question. And it all comes down to the upper bones in your neck, what we call the cervical spine, your C1, C2, and C3. How are these ones lining up? When these ones are misaligned, as chiropractors we call that a subluxation, when the bones are misaligned causing stress. One of the things that we typically see with a C1, C2, C3 subluxation is a patient can actually experience vertigo or dizziness. And we'll do a chiropractic adjustment on the C1, C2, or C3. And the patient usually gets better. Now when it's a chiropractic case, the reason this happens a lot of times can be the nerves coming out of these vertebrae going to your ears. And if the ears are under stress, vertigo could be a problem. And so with the chiropractic adjustment, we can alleviate the subluxation, get the stress off the nerves, and then the nerves can go back to being normal and the vertigo should clear up. Another area this has a lot to do with is your cerebellum. Your cerebellum. I always call it your switchboard of your brain. You know the, to really simplify neurology, the nerves come up the spine. They go with the cerebellum and the cerebellum directs 'em into the brain. They come outta the brain, the cerebellum, cerebellum outta the body, the midbrain. So what does this have to do with a lot? We know a lot of times if you have really bad neck posture that this could actually create pulling on the spinal cord. Several podcasts in the past I've talked about these ligaments that come straight off from your spinal cord. They're called dentate ligaments. They are very strong ligaments. And what they do is they hold the spinal cord in place up and down the spinal canal. You don't want your spinal cord shifting up and down. That would be a lot of pressure on the nerves coming and going and create havoc. So the spinal cord is locked down into place. So if you see five nerves coming out, your spinal cord is not going to move very far up and down. It's going to stay pretty stable where it is. And so when we have a neck injury or we have poor neck posture, let's say that you have a whiplash and you whip your head back and forth real quick, that creates a lot of pulling and yanking. Or, if you have really bad neck posture, like the tech neck and looking down all the time, reading books, sitting way too much, having your shoulders roll forward, your head sticking out. This also creates a lot of pressure in the brain stem. It's not like all at once like a whiplash would be, it's accumulative over time. Cause you see again, if I take my nice round neck curve and I straighten it. It lengthens. And if it's lengthening, and I just said the spinal cord itself is not going to budge up and down. One of the only things left to have happen is the midbrain itself gets pulled down to the base of the skull. And when that happens is you're jamming your cerebellum. You're affecting your cerebellum. Cerebellum tests that we do in neurology mimic a DUI test. We have you walk, heel to toe, and see if you tip over, see if you can keep your balance. So there's pressure that causes a problem. And what we've been able to witness under motion MRI is when we adjust the upper cervicals, the midbrain can literally get pushed back into the cranium, and that would actually Ironically, it would make you a little more vertigo at first because the spinal fluid flow would change as the drain gets unclogged and the spinal fluid starts moving. But then like after about 15 20 seconds you level off and the vertigo should start to go away. So I've seen vertigo cases after a severe whiplash case and I've also seen vertigo. When I X-ray the spine and I see a really bad curve, and that's gonna be when it came out more gradually, got a little worse and worse, versus the whiplash, it's gonna be like, didn't have it yesterday. I have it today after the accident. So that would be more of those cases. Now, what to expect if you go to the chiropractor for these three different scenarios? First, the chiropractor should probably take x-rays of your neck to see what's going on with these vertebraes long. We wanna look at the C one, C two, and C3 alignment to make sure those are lined up properly. So that would be a front to back view and the chiropractor would probably have you open your mouth really big because the teeth hide the bones on the x ray. A lot of people think that we're teasing them, but your teeth actually block the top bones in your neck so we can't see behind, we can't see through your teeth on the x ray. So we have you open your mouth really big and we call it. a to p open mouth x ray to really analyze those. Now the c1 vertebrae I always tease looks like a bow tie. It would be like two bow tie shapes on each side and those two shapes should be level and about the same size. If they're not level, let's say The left one's higher than the right one. That's a subluxation. Or evidence there could be a subluxation. And if one of them is larger than the other, then we assume it's rotated. It's not really bigger, it spins, so it gets closer to you, so it looks bigger. The C2 is real obvious to see. There's a little, I call it a little tree stump that sticks up from there. It has a great big spinous on the bottom. Those should be in a straight line. If we see one deviating from the other, we have an issue. And then the angles itself should be nice and parallel and level. If they're not, then we have an issue. And lastly, the C3. more or less the same thing we're looking at here. So if those are misaligned then we assume there could be a subluxation there. So your chiropractor should be able to show those to you on x ray and say here we go, here's a problem. But I did talk about two other causes right, a whiplash or cumulative overtime. So on that x ray we take a sideways view of your neck to look at your neck posture. Now you should have a nice round c shaped curve in your neck. Now if you just had a whiplash you might not see that. Now when I have a whiplash case we always do what I like to call flexion extension where we have you Look up as far as you can and down as far as you can because a lot of times this is the first time I've met somebody I don't know what their posture looks like normally. So it's hard for me to judge if they always had this bad posture or is this posture new from the accident. Now if you look up and down, if you see two bones that aren't moving, now we know we have a fixation problem, we possibly have a whiplash injury and the whole pulling on the brain stem thing could be a reality. If you have a motion MRI machine, that would definitely spell it out. But I don't think there's many of those in the country. I have a friend down in Jacksonville, Florida with one, Dr. Longyear, but if you're down in Jacksonville, it might be hard to see it. So that's what we do. We do the sideways view, neutral, where you're just standing still and then looking down and looking up, and we look to see if there's any bones that aren't moving upon each other. And how I do that is I take a clean piece of film, I put it over the x ray and I draw on all the vertebrae. And then I just hold that up to the other ones and see what's moving and not moving. It's fun. I've had to do it one time for a deposition for an auto accident case, and that was a pretty easy win because it's pretty obvious. So that's second way, look to see how the neck curve is doing. The third way, again, like I talked about, this will be more accumulative. Like I've been sitting for years behind a desk, or I'm in front of my phone way too much, or my tablet way too much, or I read a book too long, but I've got these shoulders rolled forward and my head coming out, and that's going to, again, ruin the posture. Now a lot of times, if this has been an accumulative one, there may or may not be some changes. disc changes into C5, C6, and depending on the light of the height of your disc gaps, that's going to make a major change in how long you need care. If your discs are starting to flatten out, this has been with you a long time and your body's really learned how to be wrong, and that's going to require more care than somebody who doesn't have that. So a lot of times people want to know how many times you'll have to come. When you call me on the phone or email me that, I have no idea. But when I look at your x rays, I can give you a much better answer of how long it's been with you. So what should you expect then? You have the x rays done, the chiropractor shows you, hey, you have a C2 problem, chiropractor shows you that your neck isn't moving when you lift your head back and forth because of a whiplash, or you don't have a curve at all, your neck curve's going backwards, this is probably part of your vertigo. Then the chiropractor should set you up in a care plan, anywhere from four times a week to three times a week for, two, six, eight weeks, I don't know, I'd have to look at your x rays to answer you that question. And I have to do your testing and your range of motion and see how bad you are. The better off you're starting, the faster you get better, the worse unhealthy you are, the longer it takes. Pretty simple stuff. How long do I have to exercise to get into shape? I don't know. When was the last time you exercised and how out of shape are you? But how bad you're dying, those things are all factors too in your care. So make sure you discuss all these issues with your chiropractor. So like I said, I've had people come in, they said, man, I've got a little bit of a headache, I got some really bad vertigo, I give them an adjustment, 15 minutes later it's all gone. Other people come in, tell me they got really bad vertigo, I look at their x rays, the spots aren't there, the curve looks good. And I tell them, I can give you an adjustment, we can try it, but you're not giving me the things That would be like a direct link to the vertigo. There's indirect links too. There's a lot of indirect links. If you're another chiropractor listening to this, I'm not saying those are the only three ways you get adjusted to get rid of vertigo. I'm just saying those are the three most in your face ones, right? The most obvious ones that chiropractic can definitely jump in and help. But yeah, there's lots of different other indirect ways that chiropractic can help with vertigo. Again, if you go to your family physician and say man, I've been having some really bad vertigo, a lot of times in my clinical experience, they'll give you stuff for motion sickness and that doesn't really help a lot of these cases. Some cases it must, but those cases don't come to me because they're doing better, they don't call me. But for the ones that don't help, they come to see me for another answer. None of them have ever been told, why don't you try a chiropractic that's never come up. They've just done it on their own. So if you're waiting for someone to refer you to the chiropractor in the medical community, you're gonna grow old waiting. If you have questions about vertigo that's been going on, challenge you. Especially if you have headaches. If headaches are a part of it, or a recent trauma, that's a great reason to call a chiropractor right there. Cause, those are like, oh yeah. We could probably help you. Let's go take some x rays. make sure. That's answer those. They don't have headaches. They haven't had direct trauma. I'm like, I don't know. Let's go take some x rays and do some examination to find out whether or not you have a subluxation. So there you have it. I hope I answered the question. If you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, only a chiropractor can answer. Go ahead and leave a comment or post wherever you're watching and listening to this. And maybe next time you tune in, I'll be answering your question. And thanks again to the Illinois Prairie State Chiropractic Association for coming up with this question for me. Those of you that called them, love it I love it. Alright, so you tried to call a chiropractor, you called the chiropractic association, which is pretty clever, I'll give you credit whoever did that. Alright, thanks everybody.