What causes dizziness and vertigo?
Dizziness is a description, not a diagnosis, and the word covers several very different problems. True vertigo, the sensation that the room is turning, usually points at the inner ear. Lightheadedness, floating and visual fog usually point somewhere else: the neck, the migraine system, blood pressure, or a brain still recovering from a concussion. Each has a different test and a different treatment, and picking the wrong one wastes weeks. Dr. Egbuzie holds certifications in vestibular rehabilitation and concussion management, and the first visit is built around telling them apart.
Small calcium crystals normally sit in one chamber of the inner ear. When they break loose and drift into one of the balance canals, every head movement sloshes them through fluid that should be still, and your brain reads that as violent spinning. It is brief, it is intense, and it is triggered by position: rolling over, lying back, looking up. It is also the most satisfying dizziness there is to treat, because a repositioning maneuver aimed at the correct canal can settle it quickly.
A virus inflames the nerve carrying signals from the inner ear, and the vertigo arrives suddenly and severely, lasting days rather than seconds. The acute phase settles on its own, but the compensation your brain builds while it does is what determines how you feel long afterward. Left alone, plenty of people end up permanently unsteady in busy visual environments like supermarkets. Guided vestibular retraining during the recovery window is what stops that from happening.
The joints and muscles of the upper neck send the brain a constant stream of head position data, and it has to agree with what the inner ear and the eyes report. When the neck is stiff, irritated or guarded after a whiplash injury, that stream becomes unreliable. The result is a foggy, off-balance feeling tied to head turning and to sustained postures, often alongside headache. Treating the neck resolves the dizziness, because the neck was the cause.
Migraine does not always mean headache. For some people the attack shows up as dizziness, motion sensitivity, and an intolerance of supermarket aisles, scrolling screens and patterned floors. The vestibular system is not damaged so much as turned up too loud. Managing triggers alongside your physician, then rebuilding tolerance through graded exposure to the movement and visual load that provoke it, is what turns the volume back down.
A head impact can disrupt the inner ear, the neck, and the way the eyes and vestibular system coordinate, often all at once. That is why post-concussion dizziness is stubborn: there are usually several problems layered together, and resting in a dark room addresses none of them. Structured therapy separates the layers and reintroduces the provoking movements at a dose your brain can adapt to instead of one it recoils from.
