Patients may veer to one side or stumble because their brain is getting different signals from the right and left ears, making it think one side of the body is moving faster than the other. Others patients feel nauseous sitting at a stop sign or riding an escalator because they can't sense if they're moving or the objects around them are moving. Before therapy with Wrisley, Robeson was tripping, bumping into people and veering off to the left when she walked. She also felt nauseous at stop signs and on escalators. You just lose any sense of humor you might have had.
Therapists customize treatment to specific complaints.
For those who also experience dizziness, she teaches exercises that actually take patients through motions that make them sick. With repeated stimuli, therapists say, the nervous system adjusts. If you do it over and over, they learn how to do it again. The result is that the patient doesn't feel sick when going through similar motions outside of therapy. In other exercises, therapists make the nervous system work harder to heal itself by taking away prompts from other parts of the balance system.