Vertigo Treatment in Langley: A Clinician’s Guide to When Physiotherapy Is the Right Referral
Dizziness is a poor referral category. It covers the older woman who tips sideways when she rolls toward the bedside table, the cyclist who hasn’t felt right since a crash, and the man whose hearing dropped the same morning the room began to turn. All three arrive under the same one-word label, and their appropriate care pathways may be very different . This piece is for the people who have to sort them. It covers where vertigo treatment in Langley at Divine Care Physiotherapy fits into that sorting, what we offer according to our published service pages and where the line sits between your clinic and ours. Sort by timing and triggers Patients use “dizzy” for spinning, swaying, floating and near-fainting and the words overlap too much to lean on. The TiTrATE framework from Newman-Toker and Edlow shifts the focus to timing and triggers. That carries over well into a physiotherapy referral. Our own vestibular rehabilitation page keeps the same distinction : dizziness is the broad term and vertigo is one kind of it. What the history looks like Think about Usual physiotherapy role Seconds to under a minute, only with a change of head position (rolling, looking up, bending) BPPV Positional testing, then repositioning if the findings fit. This is the core of our vertigo work. Continuous vertigo for hours to days, nausea, trouble walking Acute vestibular syndrome, including peripheral vestibular disorders and potentially serious central causes. Medical evaluation first. Medical assessment first; vestibular rehabilitation when clinically appropriate. Spontaneous episodes lasting minutes to hours, with hearing change or tinnitus Ménière’s or other inner-ear disease Medical or ENT lead. Physiotherapy for residual imbalance. Episodes with headache and light or sound sensitivity Vestibular migraine Medical lead. Rehab may address motion sensitivity between episodes. New dizziness after concussion, head injury or whiplash Often several at once: BPPV, neck, vestibular, visual Our vestibular and concussion pathways overlap here. Chronic unsteadiness, falls, older adult, long medication list Multifactorial: drug effects, neurological, visual Fall-risk assessment and balance work, alongside medical review. The table is a conversation aid, not an algorithm. Bedside oculomotor assessment in acute vestibular syndrome (the HINTS exam) is best left to clinicians trained in it. A physiotherapy visit is not a substitute. New weakness or numbness, double vision, slurred speech, a severe or sudden headache, inability to stand unaided, or sudden hearing loss belongs on an emergency or urgent medical pathway, not in our booking system. What happens when BPPV is the working diagnosis Our pages describe the sequence like this: History. Onset, triggers, balance and walking. Positional testing. A Dix-Hallpike or roll test, with the physiotherapist watching the eyes for nystagmus. The findings help identify the affected canal. Repositioning. When the findings fit, controlled head movements use gravity to guide displaced crystals back toward their proper place. Afterwards. Advice on movement and activity, and exercises for balance, coordination and visual stability if they’re still needed. Our BPPV page is open about the variables. Recovery differs, particularly when more than one canal is involved or the BPPV followed trauma. There is no fixed session count, though some people with accurately identified BPPV improve after a small number of treatments. Treatment response varies between individuals. Rather than suggesting a clinic-specific success rate, we refer to established clinical guidelines when discussing expected outcomes. For reference, the 2017 AAO-HNSF guideline supports Dix-Hallpike for posterior canal BPPV, a canalith repositioning procedure as treatment, and reassessment within a month. It advises against routine imaging or vestibular testing in patients who meet diagnostic criteria for BPPV. It also advises against routine vestibular suppressant drugs, and it asks clinicians to discuss recurrence and fall risk. That is the standard we’d expect any service in this area to be held to. When the dizziness outlasts the crystals If symptoms continue after BPPV treatment, or the assessment points to another vestibular or balance problem, our pages describe rehabilitation built around the findings. It can include: balance and coordination retraining gaze-stability and visual-vestibular exercises where appropriate walking confidence a home program The conditions listed on our vestibular page are: vestibular neuritis and labyrinthitis Ménière’s disease age-related vestibular degeneration ototoxicity barotrauma head trauma Acoustic neuroma is also listed, with the note that it needs proper medical evaluation. For peripheral vestibular hypofunction, the 2022 updated Hall et al. guideline in the Journal of Neurologic Physical Therapy gives vestibular rehabilitation a strong recommendation. That is the evidence behind the exercise side of the service. A composite case : the post-collision patient This is an illustration built to show the reasoning, not a real patient. A 34-year-old driver, three weeks after a rear-end collision. Rolling over in bed sets off a short burst of spinning. Separately, she has neck stiffness, a headache by mid-afternoon, and screens tire her quickly. Her family doctor has excluded anything urgent. There are three questions here, and they don’t share an answer: Does a positional test reproduce the spinning? What is the neck contributing? How do balance, walking and eye movement look when she’s tired? Our BPPV page lists those same areas for assessment: balance, walking, eye movement, neck movement and positional responses. Our concussion page adds that concussion can sit alongside cervical and peripheral vestibular injury, which is why the three questions get asked together. The useful point for the referring doctor is that the bedroom spinning and afternoon headache may require different assessment and treatment approaches. Sorting them early keeps the whole picture from being filed under one slow label. If her ICBC claim is approved, our fees page states she pays nothing for physiotherapy. What makes a referral note useful Patients can book without a referral. Our pages say so, and they say that a physiotherapist who finds something needing a doctor’s opinion will refer the patient on. A few lines from you still help. For anyone you’re sending our way for vertigo treatment in Langley, the most useful are: when it started, and what came before it (injury, infection, a new medication) how long episodes









