The Springfield Clinic Physical Therapy department is please to provide our patients with Central Illinois' only Smart Balance Master, a state-of-the-art diagnositc system simulating six sensory conditions, providing precise measurements of your body's performance.
Balance affects our everyday lives. Its vital for normal everyday activities. Just about everything you do requires balance control. Balance is fundametal to many daily activities: walking, driving and sense of stability and well being.
Have you ever been sitting in a car when a car in the lane next to yours started forward, and you thought you were going backward? Our eyes can sometimes fool us. Or when you spin around and around then stop suddenly do you feel dizzy? The fluids in your inner ears keep moving for a few seconds. Your brain senses that you are still spinning even though you stopped, and you get dizzy. When the inner ear fluids settle down, the dizziness goes away. For a complete sense of balance, we also need the vestibular system—fluid-filled organs in the inner ear—and proprioception, the information received by the nerves in the skin, muscles and joints.
Motion sickness, seasickness and the queasy feelings in your stomach when you're on a roller coaster all stem from the same basic reaction. The external motion makes the fluids in your inner ears move. This can sometimes overload the brain with sensory input, which causes queasiness and sometimes nausea and vomiting.
The above are just examples of impared balance. Do you ever feel dizzy, shaky or off balance? Have you ever experienced symptoms like those above? More than 90 million American adults experience dizziness or balance problems at some time in their lives.
About the Smart Balance Master
Specialized evaluation and treatment techniques can help solve your specific imbalance or dizziness problem. We will work very closely with your physician to determine the source of your imbalance. To do so we offer a new solution with specialized training and skills to provide a comprehensive look for measuring a person's performance with precise challenges with our Smart Balance Master.
By measuring how much your body sways under different conditions these tests can help determine the nature of your balance disorder. These challenges help to identify and isolate the causes of your balancing problem. With this procedure the treatment is targeted to a known and measured problem(s). We check regularly to ensure perfomance is improving through the treatment, helping you return to your normal daily activities without the fear of falling.