Approaching Vertigo!
Medgeeks with Andrew Reid
Medgeeks
4.8 • 997 Ratings
🗓️ 21 October 2019
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A 43 year old male with a past medical history of hypertension, diabetes, and hyperlipidemia presents to the emergency department with dizziness that started 14 hours ago.
He complains of nausea and vomiting.
He denies recent trauma, fever, headache, visual disturbance, or weakness. He says he requires the assistance of his wife to walk because he feels unsteady.
His symptoms are relieved when he sits down at rest, but they never fully resolve. When you speak to him, his symptoms looks a lot like vertigo.
He tells you that his dad had vertigo and he would lay down and turn his head in different directions. But, you know this could be more serious than a simple case of BPPV.
So, how are you going to approach this patient, to differentiate what's causing his symptoms?
Today, on the Medgeeks podcast, we'll be discussing dizziness!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A 43 year old male with a past medical history of hypertension, diabetes, and hyperlipidemia |
| 0:05.4 | presents to the emergency department with dizziness that started 14 hours ago. |
| 0:09.8 | He complains of nausea and vomiting, denies any recent trauma, fever, headache, visual disturbance, or weakness. |
| 0:17.0 | He requires the assistance of his wife in order to walk because he feels unsteady. |
| 0:21.0 | His symptoms are relieved when he sits down and rest, but they never fully resolve. |
| 0:25.3 | As you speak to him, his description of his symptoms sound a lot like vertigo. |
| 0:29.6 | He tells you that his dad used to get vertigo and that it would go away when he did these special movements where he'd lay down and turn his head to different sides. |
| 0:37.0 | But you know that this could be more serious than a simple case of BPPV. |
| 0:42.0 | So how are you going to approach this patient in order to differentiate |
| 0:45.5 | what's causing his symptoms? Today on the med geeks podcast we're talking about dizziness. Welcome to the med geeks podcast everyone. This is Eric Gordon and today we're talking |
| 1:09.0 | about dizziness. Disiness can be a frustrating topic because dizzy can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different patients |
| 1:17.3 | when a patient complains of feeling dizzy they could mean that they feel like they're about to pass out. |
| 1:23.0 | They could feel that they think the room is spinning around them or that their balance is off. |
| 1:27.0 | Maybe they have double vision, but maybe they're just fatigued, maybe they're just hungry, |
| 1:32.0 | maybe they don't want to go to work. |
| 1:34.0 | There's a lot of reasons people say that they feel dizzy. |
| 1:37.0 | It's a word that's very nonspecific and it requires a very precise and thorough history. I've been extremely frustrated when working up |
| 1:46.0 | patients with dizziness because I feel like it's so unclear what the actual problem is. |
| 1:51.1 | For the purpose of this podcast today, we're going to focus on vertigo. We'll talk about how do you |
| 1:56.8 | identify vertigo from the other causes of dizziness, how do you differentiate the different types of |
| 2:02.1 | vertigo, specifically how do you not miss a life-threatening |
| 2:06.8 | cause of vertico, which would be a stroke, a posterior stroke in the cerebellum or brainstem. |
... |
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