Are You At Risk of a Fall?

We have recently added the CAPS (Comprehensive Assessment of Postural Systems) unit to the practice and are excited to be able to offer an objective measurement of your balance and center of gravity. Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is a big problem and can begin with a fall.

Most people, particularly young to middle age people, are totally unaware that they have a balance disorder. Maintaining balance is so important to us humans that our postural control system has built-in “redundancies” or “back-ups”. For instance when one of the sensory inputs used in controlling balance is inadequate, the central nervous system automatically turns to other inputs to obtain similar information. In other words, a fully functioning part of the system will help do the work of a part of the system that is not fully functional.

The problem comes when people get older and have more than one part of their balance system that’s not 100% functional and/or when they encounter an unusual situation and the working parts of their balance system are unable to compensate and overcome the unexpected “obstacle.”