You may not need treatment right away or at all. Your clinician will keep a close eye on your condition to see if it improves on its own. If your symptoms don’t improve, or if they return or worsen, treatment is the next step.

Your clinician may prescribe medications, such as antihistamines, to help with the spinning feeling of vertigo. Other types of medications that may reduce associated symptoms include:

• Antiemetics to ease nausea and vomiting
• Antibiotics to treat infections
• Benzodiazepines to reduce dizziness and relieve anxiety
• Steroids to lessen inflammation

Your clinician may recommend changes to your diet and lifestyle to reduce vertigo. These changes may include:

• Eat and drink more regularly
• Increase fluid intake
• Limit the amount of caffeine and alcohol you consume
• Lower stress
• Manage allergies
• Quit smoking
• Reduce or increase salt in your diet
• Reduce sugar in your diet
• Sleep better

Balance therapy is a specialized exercise program to help you improve your balance and cope with vertigo and dizziness. A physical therapist teaches you exercises, such as:

• Balance retraining to help you adapt to imbalance and feel steadier
• BPPV exercises to move the crystals that cause BPPV out of your inner ear
• Habituation exercises, which teach your brain to ignore dizziness by exposing you to motions that typically cause you to feel dizzy
• Posture training to practice standing and sitting
• Stretching exercises to increase your flexibility
• Vision stability exercises to help you control your eye movements
• Walking exercises to practice maintaining your balance

In BPPV, small crystals (canaliths) in your inner ear loosen and move into the semicircular canals, which sense motion and control balance. The canaliths disrupt fluid movement, resulting in false signals in the brain and vertigo.

CRMs are exercises to treat BPPV. They involve precise head movements that allow gravity to carry the crystals out of the semicircular canals. A specially trained physical therapist performs the maneuvers.

At Stanford Health Care, our surgeons offer the latest techniques and least invasive options to help treat balance disorders. We provide highly specific surgical procedures for different types of conditions. Surgery may provide substantial and lasting relief of symptoms, depending on the cause of vertigo.

We use stereotactic radiosurgery to treat cancerous and noncancerous tumors in the brain that cause vertigo. Radiation beams target the tumor without affecting the healthy tissue around it.

Our surgeons are highly skilled in cutting-edge robotic radiosurgery techniques, including CyberKnife, which works faster and is more effective than other types of radiation treatment.