What Do Vertigo Treatments Entail?

Vertigo isn’t a condition in and of itself. Instead, it is a range of symptoms that people experience as a direct cause of a different condition – usually a condition that involves or affects the inner ear. People experiencing vertigo will generally describe feelings of sickness, dizziness or the sensation that the world around them is tilting. If you are experiencing any of these symptoms, you may want to consider vertigo treatment. Here’s some information that will help you to understand what treatment entails!

What does treatment entail?

There’s no one size fits all treatment when it comes to treating vertigo and minimizing the symptoms associated with it. But generally speaking, most individuals experiencing vertigo will visit their ENT and undergo one of the three following means of treatment.

Treating the symptoms

Generally speaking, the first steps of vertigo treatment focus on symptomatic treatment. This means that treatment is arranged to tackle your unique symptoms without necessarily having to find the specific cause of your vertigo. Often, vertigo is caused by a viral infection that will clear up independently and of its own accord. Waiting for it to resolve itself is essentially a waiting game. 

Viruses often last a course of a few weeks and will take symptoms with them when your body has dealt with them. This sounds like a long time to have to wait, but the good news is that a professional ENT will be able to help you to manage your symptoms to make this period more comfortable. Often, symptoms are treated with travel sickness tablets, which suppress information passed from the inner ear to the brain. This reduces feelings of sickness or dizziness. Your ENT may also be able to recommend some exercises that can offer further relief from your symptoms.

Treating the cause

Sometimes, vertigo isn’t caused by a virus. In cases like this, you will need to visit an ear nose and throat specialist to treat the underlying condition that is resulting in vertigo symptoms. If your ENT finds that your vertigo is being caused by a migraine, they will be able to provide you with information and advice on how to minimize the number of migraines that you experience. 

A session with your ENT will help them to discover what your migraine triggers are, allowing you the opportunity to actively avoid them. They can also show you different exercises that can relieve tension in your neck or they could prescribe medication targeting migraines.

If you have Meniere’s disease and this is a cause of your vertigo symptoms, your ENT can also suggest dietary or lifestyle changes to help. This will generally include reducing salt, alcohol and caffeine consumption.

If your symptoms are found to be caused by blood flow within your inner ear, your ENT may prescribe medication to regulate pressure.

Surgery

If the above steps don’t help, or if you are experiencing extreme symptoms of vertigo that interfere in your day to day life, your ENT may suggest ear surgery. This tends to be the last option on the list, but can prove extremely effective for individuals who really need it.