Has anyone found ways for relief without surgery? My weekly chiropractic visits really help with the headaches & dizziness, but the relief of course is very short lived.
I would say not to any level of importance. It is hard to fix symptoms when the spinal canal’s contents and the cerebellum are squished on a constant basis. I remember when I first came on to this site, people touted arnica cream as the best thing ever for pain. But, it did not do much and is out of fashion. The trend right now is marijuana derivatives and whatever “it” treatment chiropractors are peddling.
I have found a lot of brain based therapies after surgery that have resolved - yes - resolved a number of symptoms that remained and emerged. Head pain and dizziness included. If things had been different, I would have given those therapies a go before surgery. The primitive reflex exercises for dizziness that are listed on this site work great. But, ultimately getting the pressure off my central nervous system, blood vessels. and nerves was the best thing ever so that I could focus on fixing up the aftermath. Hard to address symptoms when the cause is still there!
As I have said before, I do not have money nor faith anymore to support quasi treatments where the relief lasts for 30 minutes or even a day. I am not sure that anything works for the Chiari occipital headaches, but I did find that graded motor imagery, trigger point self-massage, motor control for the neck, and neurodynamic exercised worked great for the neck and head pain that grew and changed before and after surgery.
I guess it depends what your belief system is for what you think will fix you and what resources you have available or are willing to seek out.
Good luck with your Chiari journey
Thank you so very much for your response, that is exactly what I needed! I feel like I hear nothing about positive surgery results, so I’d decided I wasn’t going to do it. The dizziness has gotten much worse lately though, that worries me the most.
This site does lean towards the negative side of Chiari as people who do well with the surgery move on with their lives and do not have a need for sites such as this. Many people have good success with surgery though it is not always 100% which can be disappointing. As I said, there is also lots of therapies to address symptoms that remain or emerge after surgery; it is just not the neurosurgeons who help you out with that!
what type of chiro care do you get? is it gentle atlas orthogonal?
I’m not familiar with that name, but she is very gentle. Everything is very slow & light, no twisting my neck or anything. And she uses what she calls an activator quite a bit. It sounds like a stapler. Lol. I could tell yesterday that I was having alot of back & hip pain, ended up having bad RLS & didn’t sleep all night. Went to the chiro today, hoping to sleep better tonight.
how many mm descent do you have and do you get adjusted in your C1 ?