Meniere’s disease and positive thinking

I am very fortunate that I receive a lot of very informative and thought provoking comments from this blog. I received one a couple of weeks ago from one of my regular readers about his experience with therapy and his meniere’s. although I don’t consider meniere’s as something that you can just stop by changing the way you think, I do think that keeping a positive outlook is very important.

This is from Jikke DeGroot

first of all: thank you for your weblog about meniere's disease. It is very helpful. It provides information, experience and hope. That is a rare combination ;-).


I would like to tell you about something I'm trying at the moment. I have had M for quite a few years now. The first attack probably was somewhere in 2004, after that I had one or two attacks a year (without knowing what it was), but for two years now I have had attacks every few weeks which leaded to an official diagnosis of M.

From september on I'm in a really bad episode. The doctors have done some tests again, and according to them one of my balance systems (right ear) is not functioning any more. They said that that should mean that the attacks should lessen (which unfortunately is not really happening yet..), but also that it will never come back to normal again.

So, the next step they advised me about, is to have my brains learn that they shouldn't listen to that particular ear any more. I know it sounds crazy, but on the other hand it may be very logical. The doctor said that your brain gets multiple signals involving your balance (from your ears, eyes, feet, muscles in the neck etc) and that it uses these signals to define your balance at that moment. With M one of those signals is wrong which causes the vertigo attacks. What the brain needs to learn is that it shouldn't use that broken signal any more in its calculations. So that's what I'm working on at the moment.


The way to do it is a bit complex. First you should try to do as much as is possible without creating actual attacks. That's always a fine line to walk on, so it goes wrong once in a while, but that's ok. Second, every time you feel an attack coming on, you nearly literally tell yourself: this is just a wrong signal, stop listening to it. For me it helps to keep the panic away and that should do the trick. When you panic, the brain goes into a frantic response and does what it is used to do (which means using all the signals, including the wrong one). If you don't panic, it will take the time to correct itself. So attacks are a lot shorter. And, according to the doctor, after a few months of learning it should lessen the number of attacks as well.

I started this a few weeks ago, so I don't know if it will work on the long run. I do know that the few attacks I had were a lot shorter, from 1-2 hours lying in bed to 5 minutes sitting at the table. For me that's enough to keep trying...

(The doctor is a clinical psychology doctor at an academic hospital)

Have you ever heard about this from others?

thanks,

Thanks Jikke

Feel free to comment and please subscribe to my RSS Feed