Shop 7/104 Northbourne Ave
Braddon ACT 2612
Braddon ACT 2612
Weekdays 9 to 5, Saturday 10 to 2.
Vestibular assessment
Your balance organ lives in your ear. That is why this is an audiologist's job.
Vestibular assessment at Candid Hearing works out whether the dizziness or unsteadiness you have been living with is coming from the inner ear, and if so which side and which part. Pooja tests it, explains what she found, and sends a written report to your GP so the next step is clear rather than another round of guessing.
Inner ear
Where the balance organ actually sits
BPPV
The most common cause, often fixed in one visit
Falls
Unsteadiness is a leading predictor of falling
GP report
Written findings sent back to your doctor
Standing upright is a continuous calculation. Your brain combines three streams: what your eyes see, what the pressure and position sensors in your feet, joints and muscles report, and what the vestibular system in your inner ear says about the movement and tilt of your head.
The vestibular part is a set of five structures on each side, three semicircular canals detecting rotation and two otolith organs detecting linear movement and gravity. They are extraordinarily sensitive, and they sit immediately next to the cochlea.
Dizziness happens when those three streams disagree. If the left ear reports that your head is turning and the right ear and your eyes say it is not, your brain has to resolve a contradiction, and the sensation of that contradiction is vertigo.
Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. Tiny calcium crystals that belong in one part of the inner ear come loose and drift into a semicircular canal, where they slosh about when you move your head and trigger a false signal of rotation.
The signature is unmistakable once you know it: short, violent spinning of perhaps ten to thirty seconds, brought on by a specific movement. Rolling over in bed. Looking up at a high shelf. Lying back at the hairdresser. Between episodes you feel completely normal.
BPPV is worth identifying because it is often resolved in a single appointment with a repositioning manoeuvre that guides the crystals back where they belong.
Inflammation of the balance nerve, often after a viral illness. Severe constant vertigo lasting days, frequently with nausea. It settles, but people are often left unsteady for months afterwards because the brain has not finished recalibrating. That residual unsteadiness responds well to rehabilitation exercises.
A distinctive combination: episodes of vertigo lasting twenty minutes to several hours, with fluctuating hearing loss, a feeling of fullness and tinnitus, usually in one ear. Because it involves both hearing and balance, monitoring the hearing over time is part of managing it.
The vestibular organs lose sensitivity with age, as most things do. It rarely causes spinning. It causes a general unsteadiness, particularly in the dark or on uneven ground, where the visual and foot-sensor streams are also degraded. This is the one most often dismissed as "just getting older", and it is also the one most responsive to targeted exercise.
Get urgent medical attention if dizziness arrives with sudden severe headache, double vision, slurred speech, weakness or numbness on one side, or difficulty walking. Those point away from the inner ear and need assessing immediately.
Wear comfortable clothes you can move in. Avoid a heavy meal immediately beforehand. Bring a list of your medications, and ideally somebody to drive you home.
Because of falls. Unsteadiness is one of the strongest predictors of falling, and a fall in your seventies or eighties is frequently the event that ends independent living. It is also self-reinforcing: people who feel unsteady walk less, walking less weakens the legs and the balance reflexes, and the unsteadiness worsens.
Working out where the dizziness comes from is not only about comfort. It is one of the more practical things you can do to stay on your feet.
Common questions
Because the balance organ is in the inner ear, a few millimetres from the hearing organ, and shares a nerve with it. Five fluid-filled structures on each side tell your brain which way your head is moving. When they misreport, you feel dizzy. Testing them is audiology work.
Vertigo is a specific false sense of movement, usually spinning, as though the room is turning or you are. Light-headedness is more like feeling faint. Unsteadiness is feeling as though you might tip over. They point to different causes, so the words you use actually matter and Pooja will ask you to be precise.
Parts of it can bring on brief dizziness, and that is deliberate, because provoking the symptom is how we find where it comes from. It settles within a minute or two. Bring someone to drive you home if you would rather not drive afterwards.
Not to be assessed here, though dizziness is one area where working alongside your GP matters, so a report goes back to them. If the assessment points to something needing an ENT specialist or a neurologist, you will be told clearly and pointed in the right direction.
Frequently, yes. BPPV, the most common cause of positional vertigo, is often resolved with a repositioning manoeuvre in a single appointment. Other causes are managed rather than cured, often very effectively with vestibular rehabilitation exercises.
That is a common and frustrating story. Imaging is good at ruling out serious structural causes and poor at detecting inner-ear function problems, because it shows anatomy rather than whether the organ is working. A normal scan does not mean nothing is wrong; it means the next test should be a functional one.
Falls. Dizziness and unsteadiness are among the strongest predictors of falling, and in older adults a fall is frequently the event that changes everything else. Sorting out why you feel unsteady is a fall-prevention measure.
Also at Candid Hearing
If you have been told to live with it, or nothing showed on a scan, a functional test of the balance organ is the step that usually gets missed.
