Dizziness - The Search for Balance

On the Search for Balance: A Balancing Act in the Midst of Dizziness

Imagine that you are 6 years old again. You are at a playground clutching a pole on the merry-go-round, which is whirling as fast as your friends can run to keep the merry-go-round going. Your friends let go and when you jump off as the merry-go-round stops spinning, you fall because the world seems to wobble out of control. Although you have stopped spinning on the merry-go-round, your brain tells you otherwise.

This is the everyday reality for a chronically dizzy person. Following headaches and lower-back pain, dizziness is the third most common medical complaint in the United States. More than 90 million people in the United States will experience a spell of dizziness at some point in their lives (1).

Dizziness is a sensation people feel when they lose their sense of spatial orientation. In other words, people feel dizzy when they lose some of their immediate contact with their physical surroundings. A simple disoriented feeling may occur, or one may experience a feeling of movement or of being off balance (2). In most cases, dizziness arises naturally from unusual changes that disrupt the normal feeling of stability. However, a disturbance or a disease in the system that maintains balance can also cause dizziness (3). What could be the cause of this internal lack of balance? Although many forms of dizziness exist, such as Meniere's disease, I am going to focus on what keeps us balanced.

The issue of balance first interested me when my mother had gone to see an acupuncturist concerning her high blood pressure. Not only did she come in hopes of finding a cure for her high blood pressure, she also found that she suffers from balance problems. The Chinese guru of an acupuncturist said, "Your whole body is out of balance. Fire blazes within you without equilibrium. You should take a vacation." Apparently, correlation exists between blood pressure and physical balance. Immediately, I became worried and confused. I have been searching for the cause of my mother's problems for some time now. Why is it that she never even noticed that the world was out of balance in her perspective? She always subtly mentioned the feeling of dizziness and the constant coldness of her right shoulder. But I never realized how serious her situation was. I now know that these symptoms are due to an imbalance.