unexplained dizziness, contstant heavy head, extreme fatigue, subtle nausea

Hello,
I am too suffering from all the same symptoms as you all are. I have frequent dizziness. Sometimes it happens when I wake up, sometimes just randomly during the day. Also, I get nauseous, and pretty bad headaches. Depression, anxiety, and mood swings are also involved in this. Anyways, I have been dealing with these problems for a little over a year now. I have been to about 8 doctors too. What I would recommend is if you haven't already, GET AN MRI DONE! Sometimes things will show up on there that could explain the dizziness. See an ENT also, so they can check out your ears and clear you for Meneire's Disease, BPPV, or fluids in the ears. If that fails, I would go to a Neurosurgeon and seek advice there. Sometimes it can be a migraine issue and an underlying seizure problem, that is why it is important to have an EEG also. Get a full panel of bloodtests done to rule out anemia and such. If everything comes out clean then here are some tips on dealing with this. These are things I do everyday.

-If you feel like you have motion sickness, invest in a pair of seabands (at Wal Mart for 8 bucks!) or you can get the Scopalamine Patch (seasick patch) from your doctor. They work really well!
-Ask your doctor to prescribe you Antivert (motion sickness med). It works ok.
-Cut back on salts, Chinese food, caffeine, chocolate, cheese, etc. Those ingredients make you more vulnerable to dizziness and headaches so watch what you eat.
-I hear taking Vitamin C and Gingko Biloba supplements work well. They are supposed to help with blood circulation. Dizziness can be related to poor blood circulation.
-Take it easy and get lots of rest! Don't stress, it will make things worse!

Anyways, good luck to you all and keep me posted on your progress.

Hello, I found the site really useful and that many of you can empathize what I am feeling on a daily basis. I feel fatigue every day for the last three weeks.

I am a migraine sufferer since age 15. Now that I am 30, I still suffer from migraine here and there. I try to stay healthy and watch what I eat. I've seen my family doctor in the past and was prescribed with Immetrix but the medication only work on occassion, mostly I would sleep the headache off or wake up suffering a little less than the day before.

Lately though, I am suffering from extreme fatigue where I would literally feel sleepy while driving or at work. My fatigue comes in cycles like a roller coaster. In the morning I cannot get myself out of bed without feeling so fatigue once I'm at work after lunch aroun 2 or 3 pm I start to slump. Then when I get home around 6pm, my slump goes down hill until I'm in bed and the cycle starts again at 7 am.

I have found sometimes if science cannot take care of this spiritual can. I've tried it over the weekend and today, not a bit fatigue. I am still skeptical and will pause to check if I syched myself out or this is working for real.

I have had dizziness and the "heavy head" feeling, combined with the feeling of going down in an elevator, and other times feeling like I got hit in the head, for about 3 months now. It started one day at work when I had a severe attack of dizziness/faintness and felt like I would pass out.

I had many of the same tests described on this site (MRI, CT, etc.), all results were normal. I was on meclizine, but it wasn't all that effective. Finally, I tried eliminating ASPARTAME from my diet (artificial sweeteners, etc.). I started this about a week ago, and I'm actually seeing a real improvement. I still have the fatigue and some headaches, but dizziness is largely gone. Has anyone else tried this? If anyone else tries it, please post!!!

Update: I should have mentioned in the original post that I'm also on Diazide (diuretic, prescribed by ENT), and have cut out caffeine -- all of this together has made a huge difference, particularly eliminating the caffeine. The Diazide alone did not help that much . . . but once I cut the caffeine, artificial sweeteners, and salt, everything got much better. I actually have some hope now, after three months of hell!

after three very long years of feeling absolutely dizzy and extremely fatigued I think I may have found the answer. The reason I am writing on this web is because I myself like several of you have been feeling soo bad I never felt like doing anything and was always very, very tired and dizzy. I had 2 ct scans and can't even count the number of blood tests and specialists I have been to over the past 3 years. I am not saying I am fully recovered yet but I am getting there. My diziness and fatigue in my opinion has been brought on by a combination of things beginning with high cortisol levels which is called "the stress hormone" and very low adrenaline which is produced by the adrenal glands. I went to a Naturopath as a very last resort and along with other things she prescribed Ribes Nigrum and believe me I swear I feel quite a bit better already after only 2 1/2 weeks. When you are low or very low on adrenaline it is serious and can cause a person to feel dizzy and always tired like I had been feeling. I am not 100% certain I will fully recover but trust me I have tried absolutely everything, even antidepressent meds because a shrink told me I absolutely take them although I had no change and felt I had to try it just so I didn't leave a possible option out. I feel 75% and that says a lot for me since I was absolutely frustrated with how bad I felt 24/7 365 days of the year.

I hope this can help someone else because when I was feeling soo bad I know how desperate I was....at least try it as it cannot hurt at all!
Dazz

Im a 3rd year acupuncture and health science student, who suffered from very similar symptoms for 4 months at the beginning of the year. I know what people go through , it is hell! waking up extremly tired, getting dizzy throughout the day, not having the strength to do what you used to can be very depressing. Then doctors think depression may be the cause .. well of course your going to feel depressed your constantly so tired!

Anyway, this topic really interests me and my heart goes out to people suffering. Blood tests come back clean and makes it out to be nothing wrong and you feel silly. DONT, there is something definatly not working properly in your body.

Firstly i want to ask some questions if anyone is out there listening for my research purposes,

Does the dizziness occur after eating/ around lunch time?
Do you find it a lot harder to read and concentrate on reading?
Do you experience abdominal bloating after meals?
Is your fatigue accompanied by weak limbs?
Is your fatigue worse in the day/night time?
Do you urinate exessively?

if someone is out there who is experiencing extreme fatigue please help me out and answer the questions.. thanks!

Does the dizziness occur after eating/ around lunch time? Not around lunch time necessarily, but it can definitely be brought on by eating certain things.

Do you find it a lot harder to read and concentrate on reading? Yes. The "heavy head" feeling makes it almost impossible.

Do you experience abdominal bloating after meals? Sometimes. In fact, the initial dizziness attack that brought all of this on occurred after some severe bouts of abdominal bloating.

Is your fatigue accompanied by weak limbs? No.

Is your fatigue worse in the day/night time? Day. Evenings are usually a time of relative relief.

Do you urinate exessively? Only for a day or so after the initial dizziness attack, which was by far the most severe one.

hi to everyone who has posted on here.i am 38 and have had these symptoms for 4 years and was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome in may.do a search on these and see what you think.all my results were normal also.if you think you have it put it to your doctor and see what they say.i spent the last 4 years attending a chiropractor assuming it was my neck it worked for a while now it does nothing,i now have acupuncture still trialling at the moment.
good luck to you all i no what your going through and how unpleasant it is it controls your life.

janette

In 1982, I came down with similar symptoms to those that so many people are posting here. At the time there was no internet and finding others with the same problems was difficult.



I had just moved from Florida to Chicago, and, for the first time in my life lived in a high-rise building. After a while I started to feel extremely dizzy, felt as if my head was filled with water sloshing around from side to side. I felt extremely heavy, and sometimes felt as if someone had suddenly thrown five hundred pounds of weight on my shoulders. I would look down at my legs amazed that I could stand up under his enormous weight. I did have earwax that the doctor removed, but it didn't help. Taking an antihistamine improved the symptoms slightly, but not much. I thought I had to have a brain tumor. The doctor said he couldn't find anything else without "sophisticated middle ear testing."



I eventually found that many of the symptoms did sound suspiciously like Meniere's Disease, so cut down on salt and caffeine. Besides that, it didn't seem like there was much more that could be done. Symptoms persisted. It became so bad that I could hardly walk, felt terribly heavy and nauseated. The feeling of enormous weight being thrown on my shoulders usually happened a few times a day. Even though there was nothing wrong with my vision, I perceived that it was twisting a bit. I felt like I was going up and down in an elevator all the time, getting that strange whoosy feeling you get when the elevator stops at a floor and jogs up and down for a second. There was a pressure in my head at all times.



The worse I got, the more vitamins I took. But during my research I found that excessive amounts of Vitamin A could cause increased "liquid on the brain," in infants. Well, if it could happen to infants, why not an adult? I cut out Vitamin A.



Taking stock of the difference in my habits, I also realized I had just started consuming Aspertame, which had just come out. I stopped using it.



In 1984, I moved back to Florida, getting out of the high-rise building. My symptoms disappeared!



Strangely, however, they will occasionally rear their ugly head again if any one of those three things I mentioned above changes. If I take a few swigs of a diet soda with Aspertame, I will usually feel a very slight occurrence anywhere up to a week later.



Once, I tried taking a multi-vitamin again, and felt the symptoms starting. Taking other vitamins has no adverse affects. Only Vitamin A.



But the thing that triggers the syndrome the most is entering a building (usually a tall building) with elevators. It is the worst in buildings with high-speed elevators, making me think that the changes in air-pressure in the building impinge on my inner ear somehow. It has nothing to do with what floor I am on. I don't have to enter an elevator. It can be in the lobby or the roof. Sometimes the feeling is immediate, strangely not as if I am being pressed down into the floor by weight, but as if the floor is pressing upward to my feet. Sometimes it doesn't happen at first. I used to visit people in NYC, and thought I was cured because I stayed in a high-rise for a week or so feeling fine. But after a couple of weeks, I could feel the head-pressure and vision twisting starting to begin.



While I hardly ever feel these symptoms any longer, I did this web search because my wife would like to move from our house to a condo, and I am worried about how that might affect me. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like any great strides have been made in our mystery syndrome. But, again, the above three things helped me a lot.



Oh, another point. It was hard to diagnose the high-rise thing in the city because in most cities you are never really standing on solid ground. There is always something going on underneath the street or sidewalk. All sorts of tunnels and passages and sewers, etc, that may have volumes of air passing through them. Or it could be that being on the sidewalk has no real effect, but by living in a city, you eventually go in and out of elevator buildings sometime. The adverse affect may be delayed, so is difficult to diagnose. So it really took getting to solid ground for a period of time to feel a difference. Also, the cure was gradual, getting better very slowly. It may have even taken months or a year before the symptoms completely cleared -- though, I think I could feel progress sooner.



Oh, yes, sometimes I can also feel the "elevator syndrome" a bit after consuming excessive caffeine or salt, but that's rare.



So, good luck everyone. I hope that this helps someone. I am bookmarking this page in hopes that someone finds the defining cure!

I just found this thread while spending yet another evening Googling about my symptoms, and want to respond to the health science student's survey. I've had these symptoms for three months now, and they're very similar to what everyone's describing. I'm a PhD student whose entire job is reading and intellectual work, and I'm finding it very hard to get anything done, because for the last three months I've been waking up exhausted, getting dizzy, unable to focus, feeling like I'm walking around in a total mental fog, feeling like my head weighs 1000 pounds, getting quickly and extremely fatigued, and I sometimes have a subtle nausea as well. My doctor has basically chalked it up to seasonal allergies and told me that I should know by now that grad school makes you tired, and I can't seem to convince her that I know what being well and tired feels like and that this is different -- something has changed, and I can't figure out what, but I can't function as a student like this. Like several other people on here, I'm having a hard time not feeling depressed as a result.

So, to answer the survey questions:

1. I'm not sure if the dizziness itself is happening after eating, but it's when I've been noticing the nausea. After I eat, no matter what I've just eaten -- even if it's something as innocuous as soup or rice -- I spend a little while feeling vaguely like I'm going to throw up.

2. Reading is very, very difficult for me right now. I have an extremely hard time concentrating, I read very slowly these days (I'm normally a turbo-reader), and I also have times where my vision gets kind of fuzzy. Reading is probably the single biggest problem I'm having.

3. I have no idea about abdominal bloating -- I haven't noticed and haven't really been paying attention.

4. I'm also not sure about weak limbs. I know that walking wears me out now like it didn't before -- I used to walk and ride my bike everywhere. But I'm not sure about weak limbs per se.

5. It's definitely worse during the day. I wake up in the morning and try to launch myself out of bed and into my day, which works OK on some days. Other days, as I'm getting dressed, I can feel the fog and the dizziness start to settle on me, and I spend most of the day feeling terrible. By evening or night, I've usually managed to wake up a little bit.

6. Yes! I'm peeing all the time! I've noticed it! It seems strange!

I'm just curious -- did you ever get a diagnosis for yourself or find something that made your symptoms stop, and is this list of questions prompted by some kind of idea you might have about what all this *may* add up to?

Have you tried eliminating artificial sweeteners? I know it sounds ridiculous . . . if you are willing to give it a try for 4 or 5 days (i.e., eliminating them 100%, as opposed to "cutting back") and report back, I'd be very curious. Caffeine also, although in my case just dropping the sweeteners alone had the biggest impact.

MRI found "retention cysts vs. polyps in the ethmoid air cells." I haven't yet seen a sinus specialist for follow-up, but from what I have been able to gather on my own, this finding explains all of the weird head symptoms (dizziness, heavy head, etc.) I've had for six months.

You others might want to check this out, especially if you've had pain or pressure in your face like I have.

I have been feeling the same for 9 months..sometimes so ridiculously tired I can't even wash a dish, dizziness was mostly in the 1st few months but still get numb/weird feeling in limbs and head. had all the tests...found I have a high red blood cell count caused by rare thing called high affinity haemoglobin which means the oxygen doesn't go around the body properly. HOWEVER...my blood results are constantly changing and naturopath thinks it could be result of virus and parasites/fungus in the gut. Felt a bit better taking probiotics but still not normal by a long shot.
Like the rest of you just want some answers...it gets so depressing

Hi I just came across this site and even though I am sorry to hear you all are experincing similar symptoms it is conforting to know I am not alone. I have been dealing with this for 6 years! I too have been to countless doctors, through many tests more than once and still nothing to fix it. They did discover I have mitral valve in my heart.
I feel as if my brain is heavy in my head, I am in constant motion like being on a boat, and somethimes get these "jolt "feelings inside me. If anyone has any advice trust me I am willing to try anything!! I am a busy mom and I try all I can not to let this slow me down but sometimes I just get so frustrated feeling like this! (not to mentioned scared!!)
kz

I had very similar symptoms to a lot of you on here, I can't remember if I had the tired feeling, but extreme vertigo and nausea. It somewhat seemed to correspond to eating (not what, but when), but nothing definitive. It seemed to be aggravated by going out into public....not that I am afraid of that, but I think I just got it in my head and then it was self fulfilling..

I went to the doctor and he diagnosed anxiety, put me on 37.5 mg (lowest you can take I think) of Venlafaxine, a few days later I felt like a normal person again....its amazing how great feeling "nothing" is! Anyways, every person is different but worth a try for sure.

I am still on it, intending to go off, but want to get into shape and feel mentally strong before I try. I also carry around an Atavin pill, just gives me a feeling of comfort, just in case I have an attack. Its probably criushed into powder by now...lol

Good luck, I know how you feel.