Earlier this month, I decided to stop doing VRT (vestibular rehabilitation therapy) exercises and attending VRT sessions for the final time. This was the fourth round, and I don’t plan on there being a fifth. The exercises just were not helpful, and I think maybe they were actually causing some harm. I also decided that I was just wasting my time because I had noticed no improvement over the three months I was doing the exercises.
At the beginning, I thought I was doing okay with the exercises the therapist gave me. However, once the therapist started introducing exercises with head and body turns, my body started to rebel. At first, I could do the exercises fine, but within about two weeks, I started having issues. I started feeling more consistently tired and started feeling it throughout the day, not just during or shortly after doing the exercises. I noticed that I felt better when I began backing off the exercises. I could turn my head with few if any symptoms or effects if I did so with my eyes focused on a point. I used a letter printed on a sheet of paper that the therapist gave me. Slowing down the speed of my head movements and body turns helped somewhat, but the symptoms came back over time. Sitting down also didn’t seem to make a difference.
The body turns were the most frustrating to slow down. I had to hold my head in seven different positions. For each position, I had to turn 180 degrees and turn back again to the starting position. I didn’t turn in a full circle, though. Turning 180 degrees and back again counted as one. I had to do it two more times for the same head position and then change the head position and repeat. Once I went through all seven head positions, I had to start over by turning on the opposite side. For the first set, I would turn to the right and then to the left to get back to the start. For the second set, I would turn left and then right. When I had to slow down the turns, it took a really long time to get through all the sets. I decided to see if I could work through them faster by using the piece of paper with the letter on it for a focus point. It didn’t work. I also found I could not do them faster with my eyes closed. The night I tried to do the turns faster with my eyes closed, I felt what I ended up concluding was a surge of adrenaline, an effect of the stress response. I spent the next hour and a half or so just sitting still and letting things calm back down.
I tried to work with the therapist on these issues. I tried to ask again about the potential that a bilateral hypofunction might be causing the issues I was having. She wouldn’t say anything about that. She did say that the exercises were meant to cause stress and that I needed to work on bringing things back down after the exercises brought out the stress response. I tried staggering the more difficult exercises so that things could calm down while doing easier exercises in between the hard ones. Even if I felt no or few symptoms, I tried to spend a little time grounding at the end of a round of exercises just in case I needed to calm something down. I also tried to introduce some of the head turning exercises by cutting back on the number of sets and how long I did them, taking short breaks between each set to calm down. I also tried during the day to look at more scrolling on the computer monitor. I would sit still when I felt like I needed to calm down, not just at those times but at other times throughout the day as well. Having to keep up with doing all these things made my days more difficult. I was worried about introducing too much stress without doing enough to calm it back down. I also questioned if these exercises were even going to help. I was approaching the three-month mark wondering if I was just wasting my time and making myself feel worse for nothing. I certainly hadn’t noticed any significant improvements to that point. I thought I was doing just fine before restarting VRT. Things weren’t perfect by any means, but I could certainly manage my day-to-day routine.
At the beginning of the month, I had to have blood work done for my next appointment with the endocrinologist. I had thyroid blood work done near the end of December, and I was very pleased with my TSH result, which was around 0.8. I expected to have a similar result this time. However, I was shocked to see that it was almost 2.5. In two months, my TSH had shot up over 1.5 points! While some may think this sort of result is typical, my TSH generally doesn’t fluctuate like this. I figured that the VRT exercises had to be responsible, due to the physical stress they were obviously causing and due to them being the biggest change to my routine. My next therapy appointment was still over two weeks away. I wondered how I was going to discuss this with the therapist. My first thought was that she wouldn’t agree that the VRT exercises had anything to do with my TSH fluctuating. I finally just decided that I didn’t want to bother with that discussion, so I called to have the appointment cancelled and decided not to return. I decided to stop doing the exercises altogether as well. I’ve felt better since stopping and am hoping that my TSH will be better when it’s next checked. I’ve just gone back to doing things the way I did them before restarting the VRT, the way that’s worked best for me. While I definitely have vestibular symptoms and exhaustion at times, I’m able to manage my daily activities. I don’t see the need for further VRT exercises or sessions at this time and don’t ever plan on attempting them again.
Although I’m disappointed that the VRT wasn’t helpful and was a waste of time and money in many respects, I did learn some things. I’d started and stopped VRT in the past and always wondered if it didn’t work because I’d not given it the amount of time and effort needed. This time, I felt I did give it my all. I tried my best to do the exercises each day and instead of stopping when things got harder, I tried to find ways to modify things so that I could continue working on the exercises. I continued with the exercises and sessions for three months, the longest I’ve ever done to this point. I truly believe now that VRT isn’t going to make things better for me and isn’t going to benefit me in any way, certainly not any more than the lifestyle modifications I’ve made and the supplements I’ve been using. Even though I really wish the therapist had been more open to considering that the right-sided abnormality was contributing to the issues I was having with VRT, she did explain VRT in ways that helped me to understand it better. Her testing allowed her to pick exercises that were suited to my specific deficits, and that helped the exercises make sense to me. I do like her and thought she was good to work with, even though her program ended up not improving things for me.
While I learned some things going through this fourth round of VRT, I’m happy to be done with it. I know now that it truly offers no benefit and actually impacts my body negatively. I definitely don’t think it’s been any more helpful or beneficial than the changes I’ve been able to make and implement on my own. I have no plans to restart VRT now or in the future.
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