Are there physiological causes for dizziness?
Dr. Whitney: The symptoms that we’re treating here in the virtual environment are specific to something that we call visual vertigo, and those people are a small subset of all the people who are dizzy. There are a lot of people who are dizzy or have vestibular disorders that don’t have difficulty in grocery stores, so it’s that small group that we think doesn’t get better without an intervention like this that we’re trying to treat. What is it about a setting like a grocery store that causes the dizziness? Dr. Whitney: We think it’s the optic flow. If you can imagine standing at a bus stop or in your car and all of a sudden, the truck moves next to you and you push on the brake and you think, ‘Oh my gosh, I think I just moved.’ That’s the feeling that I think people with visual vertigo have all the time – they perceive that the world is moving when it isn’t. Specifically in the grocery store, is there something about the layout of the items that are there that makes the symptoms worse?
