Vestibular Migraine: My head doesn't hurt, but I'm dizzy (What Your Doctor Didn't Have Time to Explain)

They were told it was BPPV. They had the repositioning done. It seemed to help, and then the dizziness came back. The tests found nothing much. A pill helped for a while. Months pass this way, sometimes years.

A good share of these patients have the same disease. Vestibular migraine.

In adult dizziness clinics it accounts for somewhere between 7 and 20 percent of patients, and in a large American pediatric series it was the most common diagnosis of all. Yet in a German population study, only one in five who met criteria had ever been given the diagnosis — and in an American survey, only one in ten had been told migraine was the cause. It is not a rare disease that hides. It is a common disease that goes unnamed.

A neurologist who has seen headache and dizziness in the same office for thirty years wrote this book to shorten that road. It reads the international diagnostic criteria line by line without using them as a gatekeeper, marks every treatment recommendation with an evidence grade, and marks the places where the author goes beyond the evidence — so the reader always knows which is which. What finds this disease is not a new machine; it is a few minutes of questions: Did you get headaches when you were younger? Did you get carsick as a child? Did your mother have headaches? This book spends more pages on how to ask those questions than on anything else.

For clinicians who see dizzy patients — and for patients and families who have spent years moving from office to office without a name. Easier than a textbook, deeper than a health book.