Balance: the ability to hold ourselves steady and upright. Our balance can be severely impacted by many different conditions. Anything from an ankle sprain, to hip pain, dizziness, ear infections, or brain injury can cause deficits in our balance, thus proper examination is warranted to achieve optimal results. Deficits in balance can increase our fall risk and chances of injury, including death. 

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

• One in four Americans aged 65+ falls each year.
• Every 11 seconds, an older adult is treated in the emergency room for a fall; every 19 minutes, an older adult die from a fall.
• Falls are the leading cause of fatal injury and the most common cause of nonfatal trauma-related hospital admissions among older adults.
• Falls result in more than 2.8 million injuries treated in emergency departments annually, including over 800,000 hospitalizations and more than 27,000 deaths.
• In 2015, the total cost of fall injuries was $50 billion. Medicare and Medicaid shouldered 75% of these costs.

There are many different approaches and considerations when treating someone with balance deficits, so at NeuroLink Chiropractic we carefully examine our nervous, muscular, and skeletal systems to determine where issues may be arising. It is often easy to determine what may have caused a balance issue, however, with prolonged changes to our stability, our nervous system can, and will, adapt to keep us upright against gravity. These changes can persist without much recognition, so, we pride ourselves on catching these changes and treating them as needed.