If misdiagnosed or mismanaged, symptoms of dizziness and vertigo can completely devastate a person’s life and interfere with the ability to walk and work.

 

For that reason, spreading the word about how to best care for people with dizziness and vertigo is an urgent need.

 

In my last blog post, I shared the revised 2017 BPPV Clinical Practice Guidelines. As the guidelines recommend, the information is relevant to all clinicians in all clinical practice settings who encounter patients with BPPV.

Dizziness is the #1 complaint from people over 75 years old to their physicians, so it is a very relevant topic to any healthcare provider who takes care of the aging population – and really all of us since we are all getting older.

Due to normal aging and the prevalence of BPPV in older adults, the relevant audience for the 2017 Clinical Practice Guidelines for BPPV includes ALL geriatric providers.

 

One challenge that we face is an “evidence-dissemination problem,” which means that many clinicians in our current healthcare climate barely have time to read the literature (or latest research) in their own specialty field, let alone reading the relevant literature published by other specialty providers.

As a patient myself, who has taken a personal interest in this topic in order to save and improve my own life, I have been uniquely motivated to read the literature on the topics of dizziness and vertigo being published by many different types of specialist providers.

Since dizziness is often a multifactorial problem – or having multiple causes, clinicians specializing in dizziness and vertigo across the lifespan, and those healthcare providers working in geriatrics, will benefit from familiarizing themselves with the research in related fields, in addition to the revised 2017 BPPV Clinical Practice Guidelines.

However, I am aware that keeping up with relevant literature is often impractical, if not impossible based on the time pressures faced by many healthcare providers today – especially my colleagues who practice in insurance-based clinical practice settings.

In an effort to educate both the public and other healthcare providers about the multifactorial considerations in fully evaluating complaints of dizziness and vertigo, optimizing patient outcomes, and to reduce the burden of reading multiple research studies from many different specialty areas, I created this collaborative Public Lecture to review evidence-based considerations for these complaints.

If you are interested in a snapshot summary of evidence-based recommendations on the multifactorial assessment and treatment for symptoms of dizziness, vertigo and imbalance, please check out my second UCSD Stein Public Lecture “Dizziness and Vertigo – Research in Aging.”

 

In this 90-minute TV show, I host a panel of experienced clinicians to discuss a comprehensive approach to reduce if not completely eliminate complaints of dizziness and vertigo.