What We Treat

Dizziness & Vertigo Treatment in Lakewood

The ceiling swinging when you roll over in bed. The grocery aisle tilting when you turn your head. You’ve started moving slower than you need to, just in case. There’s a reason it happens, and a cause-first evaluation is how we find it.

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Sound Familiar?

Does this sound like you?

  • The ceiling swinging past you when you roll over in bed
  • Standing up from a chair and holding onto something until the room settles
  • Turning your head to back out of the driveway and watching the world slide sideways
  • Bending down to load the dishwasher and coming back up unsteady
  • The queasy, seasick feeling that hangs around long after the spinning stops
  • One ear that feels full and plugged, and print you can’t hold your eyes on

Two or more? You’ve run your own home for decades. Dizziness doesn’t get to take that over. Keep reading.

Why It Happens

Dizziness is the symptom. Your balance system is the story.

Three things tell your brain where you are: your inner ear, your eyes, and the sensors in your joints. They’re supposed to agree. When one of them sends a bad report, your brain gets three different stories and the room starts moving. The most common culprit is tiny crystals in the inner ear that have drifted out of place, which is exactly why rolling over sets it off. Sometimes it’s inflammation in the balance nerve. Sometimes it’s fluid pressure in the ear, or migraine wiring misfiring between the brain and the ear.

You can’t tell which one from the outside, and guessing wastes months. So we look at your eye movements, your inner ear response, and how your balance reacts when we challenge it. That’s what shows us which system is lying. Vestibular Therapy then retrains the other two to stop believing it, instead of just muting the symptom until the next episode.

Physical therapist checking a patient’s eye movements and balance reactions during a vestibular evaluation

The Honest Truth

Waiting out vertigo teaches you to stop moving.

If you keep waiting

  • You stop turning your head quickly, so the system that needs the practice gets less of it
  • Driving, the shower and the top step turn into decisions instead of habits
  • The list of places you skip gets longer: crowded aisles, busy screens, anywhere with no wall nearby

If you start now

  • Thirty to sixty minutes, and you walk out knowing which system is causing it
  • Treatment starts in that same visit, not after a stack of referrals
  • A plan with an endpoint: you know which phase you’re in and what’s left

Nobody regrets starting too early. Plenty of people wish they hadn’t waited.

How We Fix It

The same four phases. Built for your balance.

Every plan has an endpoint. Here’s what the four phases look like when the room won’t hold still.

First visits

Pain

Settle the spinning.

If loose crystals are the cause, canalith repositioning moves them back where they belong. We take the edge off the nausea that rides along with them.

Once the spinning settles

Prime

Get the signals agreeing again.

Gaze stabilization and habituation work teach your eyes and inner ear to line back up, in doses small enough that you can tolerate them.

As balance returns

Perform

Make it hold up in real rooms.

Balance retraining on different surfaces, with head turns, in the kind of busy visual places that used to end an outing early.

Before you finish

Prevent

Know what to do next time.

You leave with the repositioning steps, the drills, and the triggers worth watching, so a bad morning doesn’t turn into a bad month. That’s the endpoint, not another appointment.

Related Conditions

Dizziness rarely travels alone.

When your balance system is off, your neck and the way you walk usually feel it too. Here’s what else we treat.

1

Balance & Gait Disorders

Reaching for the wall on the way down the hall.

Learn More 2

Headaches

The one that starts at the base of your skull and owns the rest of your day.

Learn More 3

Neck Pain

Turning your whole body to check the blind spot, because your neck will not.

Learn More

Questions, Answered

What people ask before booking for vertigo.

Briefly, sometimes, and that part is on purpose. Retraining a balance system means giving it small, controlled doses of the movement it has been avoiding. Your therapist starts at a level you can handle and builds from there, one-on-one, every visit. If a technique is too much on a given day, we change it that day. You are never parked on a machine to ride it out alone.

You can start with us directly. California Direct Access lets you see a licensed physical therapist for up to 45 days or 12 visits, whichever comes first, with no physician sign-off. We accept 14 insurance plans, and we go through your benefits with you before you commit to anything. If your evaluation turns up something a physician should look at, we will say so and help you get there.

You get a real answer at the evaluation, once we know which system is involved, rather than a guess before it. As a general guideline, 2 to 3 visits a week for 4 to 6 weeks gets the most out of a plan, and sessions run 30 to 60 minutes. Some people need less than that. Either way you get a plan with an endpoint, so you always know which phase you are in and what is left.

Book Your Visit

Ready when you are.

Request a time and a real person calls you back during business hours. No phone tree. No ‘someone will reach out.’ Just a plan.

  • Hours Monday–Friday, 9:00 AM–5:00 PM
  • (562) 512-3320 Prefer to talk now? Call us.
  • No doctor’s referral needed to start

We call back during business hours, Monday to Friday

Step 1 of 5

So we know who to look for when you walk in.

Visit Us

Care this good, this close.

The PT People

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