Transcription
[Music] I just wanted to explain about how cervical instability causes a bunch of ear symptoms. A lot of people don't know that. They just know that they have ear pain or ear fullness or sensitivity to sound. And you know, they'll go to their ENT doctor and various other doctors, maybe even get diagnosed with Meniere's disease. And they don't realize that the cause of the symptoms of Meniere's disease, the dizziness, the tinnitus, the ear fullness, possibly decreased hearing, or the opposite, sensitivity to sound, is actually from cervical instability.
The eustachian tube, which is the connection between the inner ear and the throat, that balances the pressure in the inner ear. So if the muscles, specifically the levator veli palatini muscle and the tensor veli palatini muscle, when those muscles don't open the eustachian tube properly, then we call it eustachian tube dysfunction. And generally, what that causes is a fluid buildup in one inner ear versus the other inner ear. So the person's balance is off, and then they can feel fullness or pain in one ear, and it can be really, really painful.
Recently, I treated a person from California who had been given hearing aids, and she had used them, you know, for much of the last ten years. And then after her third Prolotherapy session, she realized when she got up that she could hear her husband. And she actually asked her husband, "Hey, could you come here?" And then, "Can you speak softer and softer and softer?" And she realized she heard everything. And she doesn't wear her hearing aids to bed. So since I treated her, just three visits, she that needed her hearing aids.
But the reason for that is when you get cervical instability, the vagus nerve, which innervates the levator veli palatini muscle, and the trigeminal nerve, which innervates the tensor veli palatini muscle, those muscles then function correctly. So then the person, like I just described, doesn't have eustachian tube dysfunction. So the ear fullness goes away, the ear pain goes away, hearing gets restored.
And this muscle here, the tensor veli palatini muscle, also dampens sound. So even without this muscle working, even the sound of your own voice can seem like way too much for you to hear. It'll seem so loud. So there's often when patients come in, because I tend to get excited, that I tend to raise my voice, that I have kind of a booming voice, especially when I get animated, and they have to say, "Doc, doc, you know," like they, you know, just because this muscle isn't working right. But after Prolotherapy stabilization of the cervical spine, the transmission of the trigeminal nerve and vagus nerve improves, these muscles start functioning, and then the symptoms like sound sensitivity go away. [Music]