THE MISSING LINK IN YOUR BACK PAIN

I’m going to walk you through the interplay between the Cerebellum, Vestibular system and your overall functionality.

The Vestibular system is a system below conscious awareness that is constantly working within your body. It informs your brain of the position and angulation of your head relative to the forces of gravity. This is designed in a way to keep the body upright and maintain a visual feed capable of viewing potential danger. Ever wondered why the only unlearned human fear is that of falling? Well the vestibular system is responsible for that. IF YOU SUFFER FROM BOUTS OF NAUSEA, DIZZINESS, VERTIGO etc this is an area to look into!

As the vestibular system functions below conscious awareness it is sometimes difficult to establish whether an issue is present.

Try this:

Stand with your feet one in front of the other, heel to toe, ensuring they are lined up.
Lift your arms up into the zombie position and fixate your gaze on something directly ahead of you (so you can win the test).
When you are feeling ready, close your eyes for as long as possible.
Don’t let yourself fall.
Open your eyes if you feel like you are going to fall over.
Repeat on both sides.

Did you fall??

With an effectively integrated vestibular system we should be able to maintain this eyes closed position for UPWARDS OF 20 SECONDS!

I’m going to go into a little bit of neuroanatomy here but will try to keep it fairly light. The vestibular system, along with your jaw and cranium (skull) all provide input for the medial zone of the cerebellum. The output of this zone is to the spine, eye motion and endocrine function. The spine then provides input for other cerebellar zones controlling the movement of your hips, shoulders, knees and elbows.

If there are changes in the sensory input received from these areas then you could experience dampened medial zone output. This can result in weakness of the spinal extensor muscles, curvatures of the spine, reductions in coordination and motor control, reductions in parasympathetic activity (rest and digest state) and loss of balance. LUCKILY these are all areas I assess (you’ve already tried one assessment above) and can programme to meet your goals.

So why did you fall? Alongside the vestibular system informing your brain of where your head is in space, this also tests your proprioceptive system. This system provides information about the orientation of the body as well as sensory information about the interaction with the environment. The proprioceptive system is disrupted by something called nociception, altering the input the cerebellum is receiving. Nociception can be caused by extremes of temperature, previous injury or poor posture, muscular fatigue, inflammation from a bad diet or drugs and alcohol.

The Cerebellum requires constant proprioceptive input with the more complex and different the input the better! Just make sure you don’t run before you can walk though, that feeling of nausea from rollercoasters that some of us experience is evidence of an overly stimulated vestibular system. Simple rolling patterns are a great place to start, they give us the safety of the floor, are still a novel stimulus (when was the last time you rolled?) and can be monitored extremely well so that we create enough stimulus for change but nothing the system can’t tolerate.