The patient is a female in her thirties. She presented to my office in acute distress with a recent onset of vertigo. Vertigo is defined as “a sensation of whirling and loss of balance, associated particularly with looking down from a great height, or caused by disease affecting the inner ear or the vestibular nerve; giddiness.” In her case, it had started abruptly a few days prior and the only thing she could do to alleviate it was lying down. She had seen her physician who prescribed medication that did not help.
On the first visit, I identified that her upper spine was misaligned in three key areas: C0, C1 & C2 (Occiput, Atlas & Axis). The brainstem exits the skull via the Foramen Magnum and occupies this region, below which it becomes the spinal cord. This region houses key autonomic functions such as heart rate and breathing. When there is stress in this region from misalignments, a lot of problems can occur in the nervous system and thus the body.
I released some tight suboccipital muscles using Active Release Technique (ART), a very specific soft tissue release technique, and then gently adjusted C0, C1 & C2. I also performed the Eply Maneuver, in case there was also inner ear involvement. The patient was able to lift her head for the first time since this started, and to also get up and walk out of the office without duress.
She returned a few days later. Only C1 was now out of alignment, and muscles on the other side of her upper cervical spine were still overly tight. Think of muscles like rubber bands – when tight, they pull whatever they’re attached to, which can pull a vertebra out of alignment. I again used ART and gently adjusted the Atlas.
Working with the body is like peeling away of an onion skin in that the next layer of dysfunction present itself once the preceding one is cleared up. With this in mind, I then determined that there was a stressor in the fascial system which was triggering the muscles in the first place. And this time, this trigger was in the emotional body.
We store our emotions in the connective tissue, Aka Fascia. Complex polypeptides of emotion find receptor sites in the fascia and can trigger physical consequences as we’ve seen above (see Candice Pert, Molecules of Emotion, The Science Beind Mind-Body Medicine, Touchstone, 1999). I used Neuroemotional Tehnique (NET) to deprogram this fascial memory, and only then did the muscle spasm fully release. The patient left the office feeling almost back to normal. And by the third visit, she had no complaints!
In this case study, I adressed two sides of the Triad of Health: Physical & Emotional stressors. There may also be a chemical trigger which we didn’t identify in this case.
Vertigo can be tricky because there can be various triggers & causes. In this case, I believe it was emotional physiology leading to muscle contraction and eventually cervical misalignments, which further lowered the neurological threshold leading to vertigo by some unidentified pathway.