Understanding How Physical Therapy Can Improve Your Quality of Life
A vestibular disorder occurs when an injury or disease affects the inner ear, your brain or the nerves that connect these two organs together. Normally, your vestibular system is responsible for controlling reflexive eye movements, as well as balance and equilibrium. Conversely, if you are experiencing a vestibular disorder, you may feel dizzy, experience vertigo and have difficulty coordinating movement such as walking, balancing and focusing your gaze. Physical therapists are specially trained to provide effective treatment solutions for individuals with vestibular issues. If a vestibular disorder is impacting all aspects of your daily living, we can customize a rehabilitation program to address your physical and emotional symptoms, and improve your overall quality of life.
The Benefits of Physical Therapy for Individuals with Vestibular Disorders
While experiencing dizziness from time to time can be quite common, it is usually never normal. However, early intervention can help you feel better faster. Following a complete examination, a physical therapist can design a tailored treatment program that includes the best exercises to relieve dizziness and improve your balance. Here are a few more important ways physical therapy can help individuals with vestibular disorders:
- Mobility and Balance: A lack of balance for someone with a vestibular disorder can be a constant and terrifying threat to daily life. Through some fairly simple exercises, a PT can drastically improve mobility issues and reduce the risk of a fall.
- Eye Movement and Gaze Stability: If a patient’s gaze is chronically unstable, maintaining daily functionality or staying physically fit can be difficult. In this case a PT may recommend eye and head exercises which focus on gradually gaining better control over eye movement.
- Dizziness: Chronic dizziness can be one of the hardest symptoms to overcome, but typically a PT will prescribe physical exercises to gradually reduce this condition. Sometimes medicine is also needed for severe cases, but usually, a patient who commits to the program will see steady progress.
- Overall Quality of Life: A key focus of any physical therapist’s work is restoring and helping to maintain a patient’s quality of life. While this can be a difficult, sometimes frustrating process for a patient, the rewards are immense and can drastically improve even the worst cases of a vestibular disorder.
At Medical Rehabilitation Centers of Pennsylvania, our licensed physical therapists can design a treatment program that works just for you by targeting your specific dizziness and balance issues. Our professionals are specially trained to assess, diagnose and treat vestibular disorders. We also help you learn how to properly perform self-treatment exercises, so that you can continue your care plan at home. After all, continuing your recommended exercise program on your own time is an extremely effective way of preventing and mitigating recurrent episodes of dizziness and imbalance. As you make improvements, exercises will steadily progress for best recovery, so you can quickly, yet safely, get back to feeling like your normal self again.
To learn more about our physical therapy services for vestibular disorders or to book your appointment, contact us at the location of your choice, or complete our online form and our team will get back to you as soon as possible.