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Vertigo, dizziness and balance problems are not just a problem with the inner ear or your sinus. This is highly important for a practitioner to understand if they want to resolve and eliminate vertigo, dizziness and balance problems. In fact balance disorders are a complex combination of neurological, hormonal, immune, mechanical, and nutritional problems.

There are several different kinds of balance disorders. There is vertigo with spinning. There is vertigo without spinning. There is ataxia which is like a clumsiness. There is disequilibrium in which your balance is off — you bump into things. There’s visual vertigo in which you walk into an area and you see something that overwhelms your brain and makes you feel like you’re spinning. There is Ménière’s disease causing imbalance, hearing loss, nausea, and tinnitus (ringing in ears). There is just plain dizziness. There is car sickness and more. And these are all individualized variations of the same neurologic and metabolic mechanisms.

Here’s the key to solving balance disorders. Remember these disorders are not simply inner ear problems. Good balance and steadiness is a result of a complex interaction between a couple of different systems: your visual system and what your eyes are seeing, your muscle joint feedback system and what your body is doing, and your vestibular system (your inner ear) and what your head is doing.

When all of these systems are playing together nicely, and they calibrate properly you’ve got good balance. When they don’t, you don’t.

The areas of the brain involved with balance disorder patients and the biggest causes of balance disorders are problems with the cerebellum, frontal lobe and parietal lobe — not just the inner ear. This is called the Functional Disconnection Syndrome (FDS) for reasons that will soon become apparent.

Your cerebellum is at the back of your brain. It’s right at the base of your skull. The cerebellum coordinates everything — your balance, your body movements, your spine movements, your eye movements, even your thought processes.

The parietal lobe of the brain must synthesize or put together all the information coming from your eyes, inner ear, and muscles and joints. This coordination of brain function creates kind of the “map” so your body and nervous system know where you are, where you’re moving, what direction you’re moving in, and how fast. When one of these areas starts to weaken or deactivate it doesn’t pull its weight and all parts of the brain — cerebellum, frontal lobe, parietal lobe, and inner ear disconnect (FDS) and you become imbalanced.

To reconnect this system the newest research and brain and metabolic technologies have found that you can “reset” the brain with numerous, targeted, specific brain-based “activations” or exercises which can strengthen the weakened areas and bring that these synchronized neurological areas in the balance.

To achieve this however the involved brain cells in the “weakened” areas must be healthy. Neurons become unhealthy due to various stresses and traumas and improper fuel to the cell, the main fuel being glucose. So imbalanced glucose mechanisms must be investigated. Generalized inflammatory processes also destabilize brain cells. There are more causes of generalized inflammatory processes that can affect the brain than this article can cover, but these metabolic mechanisms along with blood sugar must be properly evaluated with blood, saliva, urine and sometimes fecal tests and be corrected to get the brain cells in proper metabolic balance. Once this is achieved by dietary alterations and natural supplementation support, further nondrug methods can be utilized to activate the weakened brain cells and bring corrective long-term balance to the system and to the balance disorder sufferer.

References:

Dizziness, Vertigo, and Imbalance

Author: Hesham M Samy, MD, PhD, Head of Hearing & Balance Unit, Otolaryngology Department, Minia University, Egypt

Coauthor(s): Mohamed A Hamid, MD, PhD, Founder and Medical Director, The Cleveland Hearing and Balance Center; Clinical and Adjunct Professor: ENT, Case-MetroHealth (Cleveland, OH), Medical College of Virginia (Richmond, VA), Ain Shams University (Cairo, Egypt) emedicine.medscape.com

Central vestibular disorders.

Dieterich M.

Dept. of Neurology, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Langenbeckstrasse 1, 55131, Mainz, Germany.

Most people who suffer from peripheral neuropathy don’t have any idea what their full spectrum of treatment options are. Most believe that (a) they have to take medications that give some relief and have side effects or just don’t work or (b) that there isn’t anything else they can do. To start let’s get a big myth out-of-the-way – “only diabetics or multiple sclerosis sufferers get neuropathy”. There is a myriad of different causes of peripheral neuropathy.

Peripheral neuropathy is a problem with the nerves that carry information to and from the brain to the legs and feet. This produces pain, loss of feeling, and inability to control muscles. But already there’s a problem with this definition — just because you feel a symptom in your hands or feet doesn’t mean that’s where the problem is. This is a huge, gigantic misunderstanding and this is where diagnoses and treatment of most peripheral neuropathy goes wrong because peripheral neuropathy is in fact a complex web of neurological, hormonal, immune, and/or nutritional problems.

So with so many potential causes or combinations of causes of peripheral neuropathy it’s important that peripheral neuropathy sufferers explore them all as “one size diagnoses and treatment” does not fit them.

One of the most common causes of peripheral neuropathy is a functional disconnection syndrome affecting the parietal lobe of the brain. The right parietal lobe of the brain receives and processes all the signals that come from the nerves in your muscles and joints on both sides of your body. When the right parietal lobe is functioning properly you have normal sensation — no numbness, no tingling, no shooting pains. But if the parietal lobe starts to weaken or slow down then the signals don’t get processed correctly and you feel numbness, tingling and pain in both of your feet, and then months or years later in your hands. This is what happens when the functional disconnection syndrome occurs in the brain. Functional disconnection syndrome is an electrical imbalance in the frequency of firing between the two sides of the brain. The two parietal lobes should fire equally. When one starts to fire less frequently than the other (due to traumas, emotional stresses, inflammatory or toxic triggers) then neurons in the parietal lobe lose their firing “timing” and we get all sorts of symptoms like numbness, tingling, weakness, pins and needles, and pain — the symptoms of peripheral neuropathy.

Another major trigger of this condition is an autoimmune response against peripheral nerve tissue. Basically what happens is your immune system attacks and destroys nerve tissue. It can even attack brain tissue itself. These attacks can be triggered by food sensitivities, viruses, infections, high amounts of insulin (diabetics) and high amounts of inflammation. The immune system mistakenly destroys nerve tissue and causes all of the symptoms of peripheral neuropathy whether attacking brain or peripheral nerve tissue.

So to properly assess and treat peripheral neuropathy each system of the body must be reviewed and evaluated. Triggers must be eliminated and problems and imbalances in the hormonal, G.I. and immune systems must be corrected, also the various imbalances unique to the individual need to be addressed with a coordinated, non-drug approach all at the same time. If this is not done the sufferer often will spend months and years going from practitioner to practitioner evaluating the various above-mentioned “pieces of the puzzle” one at a time. Although the patient may occasionally “luck out” by accidentally addressing the correct cause this dis-organized approach to a problem as complex as peripheral neuropathy is usually doomed to fail and is the reason why medications and surgery yield poor long-term results when utilized as treatment options for the peripheral neuropathy patient.

Most people view ADD, ADHD, hyperactivity and learning disabilities as a behavioral problem or psychological issue when in fact these disorders are a complex net of neurological, immunological and nutritional problems.

ADD, ADHD, hyperactivity disorders etc. are labels and not good ones. They put expectations on a child that they often will live up or down to. Traditional diagnoses of ADD, ADHD are understandable but they don’t tell us what to do to find the mechanism of the child’s “behavioral” problem to balance, improve and or correct it.

The “behavioral problems” stem from neurological and metabolic imbalances. It is not that these are socially dysfunctional children per se. Their behavior is result of multiple “functional” imbalances. The latest research is clear on what causes most “behavioral problems” and that is an electrical imbalance between the two sides of the brain. This is called the Functional Disconnection Syndrome (FDS). Here’s how it works. The brain has two completely different sides with completely different functions which need to be coordinated for the whole brain to work in a balanced fashion. These two sides of the brain must fire at an equal frequency for us (humans) to be “normal”. If one side fires less than the other (due to trauma, severe emotional stresses, virus, infections, inflammations, etc.) then that part of the brain will express less function and less ability to express itself.

In many (not all) behavioral children the right side of the brain is deficient. The right side of the brain houses our social skills, likes soft music and sounds, houses the stop mechanism of our brain, is the “sad” side of our brain, controls body awareness, concentration and self-control. The left side of this child’s brain likes rote memorization; it’s where our “academic” skills reside, likes loud noises, flickering lights (think computer, TV, etc.), likes sameness — doing things over and over again. This is a very minimal description of the cerebral hemisphere functions but it should serve to educate in this scenario.

Let’s go back to the functional disconnection syndrome and we can see very quickly what happens in the ADD, ADHD, learning and behavioral disabled child. Something occurs to cause the brain to “disconnect” the wiring between the two brain hemispheres and in this example the right brain becomes weakened and not working very well and the left brain becomes dominant. You get a child that likes TV, video games, computers and all things loud (left brain). They interrupt due to the right-sided weakened social skills. They “perseverate” — they do the same things over and over again (left brain). They like routines, rituals (left brain). They have a good memory (left brain) usually they have poor social skills (weak right brain), poor body awareness (weak right brain) can’t concentrate (right brain) has tantrums (right brain) and can’t control themselves. This is the ADD, ADHD and frankly OCD, Aspergers and Autistic brain patterns.

This is the hallmark of learning disabilities and “behavioral problems” a brain that is functionally disconnected — it is out of balance. And balance and coordination is the key to their recovery. The bottom line remains — one side of the brain becomes very dominant, the other neglected. Over time if the FDS is not corrected, the neglected side (the weak side) almost never gets better on its own. In fact many times it gets worse.

Modern understanding of the neurology of the brain and the metabolic imbalances that trigger and drive imbalances and prevent them from correcting themselves are well understood as are the specific individualized nondrug methods for their correction. Unfortunately very few practitioners utilizing the current models of care have ever heard of the syndrome, know how to recognize it, or how to treat it successfully. Finding a practitioner with a background in functional neurology and metabolic work is the first step for successful recovery.

References:

The Cognitive Neurosciences, MIT Press, 1994

Disconnected Kids Dr. Robert Melillo Perigee Trade January 2010

Mainstream medicine considers fibromyalgia to be a muscular or psychological problem; but in fact fibromyalgia is a complex set of neurological, hormonal, immune, nutritional, and musculoskeletal problems.

The newest research indicates the central cause of fibromyalgia symptoms in most cases is an electrical (not chemical) imbalance in the brain called the “Functional Disconnection Syndrome”. Both hemispheres and all lobes of the brain are designed to work and vibrate “in sync”, coordinating its myriad of ultra-complex functions. When this occurs everything works fine and it’s difficult to even become ill (remember the brain controls all systems of the body) but when different lobes and hemispheres are firing out of sync (like a symphony orchestra with certain musicians playing at different rhythms) neurons (brain cells) are not harmonic and we begin to experience multitudes of seemingly disconnected symptoms in the areas of the body supplied by the poorly firing neurons. These symptoms include pain, tenderness, fatigue, memory loss, rapid heartbeat, headaches “migraines”, irritable bowel, hormonal imbalances, and much more.

The newest research also indicates a major cause of fibromyalgia is clinical and subclinical autoimmune attacks against various tissues. This is a complex process, but basically what happens is your immune system attacks and destroys tissues in your body could be nerve, brain, thyroid, pancreas tissues, causing fatigue, depression, and brain fog.

This immune system attack is totally abnormal and can be triggered by food sensitivities, viruses, infections, high amounts of insulin, high amounts of inflammation, and stress causing the immune system to attack or destroy nerve tissues and cause all of the symptoms of fibromyalgia.

The newest research also links abnormal blood sugar levels and hormonal problems to fibromyalgia. Many female fibromyalgia sufferers have menstrual problems, polyceptic ovaries, early menopause or thyroid issues that occur along with the fibromyalgia symptoms. Not a coincidence.

The above plethoras of conditions are ultimately “triggered” by a multitude of different things. Many fibromyalgia sufferers trace their problems back to a major infection or illness (for example pneumonia, bladder or yeast infection). For others it’s a physical trauma like a car accident or “birth of my last child”. Toxic exposures (cleaning chemicals, paint fumes) are common as many fibromyalgia victims cannot detoxify chemicals and toxic metals. Emotional stress is just as strong a trigger as anything else (going through a divorce, death of a loved one) the stress revs up your blood sugar, adrenal and inflammatory systems and totally throws your system out of balance.

As you can see fibromyalgia is not a muscular or psychological problem. It is complex. 10 different fibromyalgia sufferers may have 10 different mechanisms of trigger, cause, or dysfunction or 10 different combinations of these mechanisms. All areas of brain dysfunction, imbalances in the hormonal, G.I., and immune system must be thoroughly assessed and handled at once for the best chance of improving or resolving the condition completely.

The key to success is a thorough history, an extensive neurological workup, and the appropriate testing to determine the “triggers” and metabolic imbalances involved in that persons individualized situation.

References:

Trauma and fibromyalgia: is there an association and what does it mean? White KP, Carette S Seminars in Arthritis & Rheumatism 29(4):200-216, 2000.

The clinical syndrome of fibrositis. Wolfe F, American Journal of Medicine 1986 Vol. 81 (suppl 3A) Sept 29, 1986; 7-14