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Dr. Eric Berg DC - How to Dissolve Crystals in the Inner Ear and Get Rid of Vertigo
Introduction: Vertigo symptoms
So the big question is how can you dissolve those little crystals of calcium carbonate in the inner ear to get rid of vertigo? That is a topic for today, and I'm going to explain this without using any medical technical terms to make it really simple.
The big problem with vertigo is that yes, you're going to feel like you're spinning, but you can also have this nauseous feeling, feeling sick. So it can be very devastating. A lot of people have this condition, and they go to the doctor, and they might do surgery. They might do exercises, which are great, but then the question is how do you get rid of these crystals so they don't come back?
What causes vertigo?
Mainly, what's causing this vertigo in most cases is this little calcium crystal in the wrong part of the ear. They're floating around, and they're going to interrupt the communication between the hairs, the nerves that go into the ear, and into your brain. This is going to affect your balance, your ability to feel like you're stable in space.
Calcium crystals in the inner ear
So what is going on here? It is totally normal to have these crystals in the ear, but they should normally exist in another part of the ear, and this is what I want to explain.
In this first compartment of the inner ear, you have these calcium crystals on top of a membrane, which is basically a layer of gel, and under that you have these little tiny hairs that are then connected to nerves that go to your brain. So what is the purpose of these little weights? They're like little paperweights. The purpose is to add mass to the gel, and by adding mass or weight to this gel, you're going to get more sensitivity to the hairs, and that sensitivity is going to relate to gravity and the position of the hairs.
So your body has perfectly designed this interesting structure, where you have this kind of gel with a kind of paperweight on top, to allow a mechanism to easily know where you are in space. You have about roughly a thousand of these crystals per ear. But what's not normal is when they get dislodged and go further down the canal into another part of the ear, where they're going to create problems.
So these calcium crystals are floating through this lymph fluid, and in a normal healthy person, that lymph has a very low concentration of calcium, and normally you should be able to reabsorb that calcium within 20 hours. However, there are reasons why this calcium might not dissolve very fast, and that's what I want to talk about now.
Number one, you could have head trauma that can jar some of these little paperweights into the wrong part of the ear. You can have an infection that does it. There are also certain medications that can cause this problem. And then you have age: just getting older can cause this problem, because as you age you start losing these calcium crystals and end up in the middle ear.
However, I found some additional information that will pretty much solve every single one of these conditions. They've done testing on this, and they found some interesting correlations. People that have vertigo have higher concentrations of calcium in the lymph, so if you have higher concentrations, you're not going to dissolve it nearly as fast, if at all.
There are some additional associations that I want to mention. One big one is this higher association between people with osteoporosis and vertigo. What is up with that? We have one common topic: calcium. When people have osteoporosis, they have a lot of buildup of calcium in the soft tissues, and people with vertigo also have a higher concentration of calcium in the lymph.
Vertigo natural remedy
So what is the key nutrient that you need to take to reestablish this calcium balance? That nutrient is vitamin D. Think about what vitamin D does in your small intestine: it helps you absorb calcium by a factor of 20 times. I also found that people who have vertigo have a tendency to have low vitamin D levels. In fact, most of the population has low vitamin D levels, especially as we age.
So this is what I'm going to recommend: minimally 10,000 IU, though I use, but I would recommend 20,000 IU of vitamin D for this problem. I would also recommend always taking vitamin K2 with vitamin D3. I also highly recommend making sure you always take vitamin D with magnesium, because vitamin D won't work without magnesium, and magnesium also naturally counters calcium buildup.
Vertigo exercises
In the meantime, you probably need to do these exercises to push the calcium from the canals into another part of the ear to prevent your vertigo. For that information, watch this video right here.