BackgroundFirst, along with my profession as a teacher I got interested in problems with visual, auditory and kinesthetic perception, which may cause difficulty in learning and studying. According to neuro psychological research (Valtonen) one and the person may have several of these perceptual problems, which is why learning may be very challenging. It's obvious that difficulty in learning caused by perceptual problems isn't necessarily due to any general cognitive deficit of the brain (e.g. developmental handicap) or negative environmental factors. It was before any knowledge about the effect of the sense of balance on all the senses that I could assume that some physiological issue was likely to be responsible for the difficulty in perception of the senses. It was the end of 2003 that I learnt about Docent Tapani Rahko's research work on the sense of balance, which I'm very grateful to the informative work of Hero, The Diverse Learners' Association in Helsinki Area. This research confirmed my earlier assumptions of the common cause of the difficulty in visual, auditory or kinesthetic perception, which had already appeared to me to be the major factors affecting learning, attention and behavior. By that that time, my profession as a teacher of English and Swedish in junior high school had provided me a good opportunity to follow these phenomena for twenty years or so. I have also got important information from diverse learners and their families on different occasions as well as from therapists in rehabilitation. I warmly thank Docent Rahko for his expertise and experience during the decades he dedicated to the research of BPV. His pioneering career as a researcher and a doctor provided a lot of interesting data on BPV, which traditionally has mostly been studied as the cause for vertigo. His research on the effect of vertigo on the muscles of eyes revealed to me the importance of the sense of balance for visual perception as well as on the other senses. I have used Rahko's, Epley's and Lempert's positional treatment techniques of BPV as a starting point for my own development of positional treatment. The most important reason for my interest in this work was the conflicting situation where the older techniques of positional treatment first gave good response, but after a year or so, they caused a lot of health and other issues. After all, I supposed that by refining the technique of positional treatment it could achieve more permanent, positive results. And luckily, this has happened for the most part. At the same time the human body has taught us what restrictions there are for successful positional treatment and how delicate the mechanism of the sense of balance is as well as what other measures must be taken to treat the sense of balance. That's why I have had to design almost all the elements of the techniques of positional treatment. In addition, the traditional concept of "Benign Positional Vertigo" became too narrow to describe the great number of symptoms which started to link with the sense of balance through the better experiences of the newer techniques of positional treatment. Therefore, on these pages I use a concept of my own, namely the Dysfunction of the Sense of Balance (the DSB). Thus, on these pages I will present how the sense of balance and its treatment can influence the perception of all the senses and the physical and mental condition and health of the human body. I will also combine empirical and research data to them from various sources, such as AD/HD –Center, Jyväskylä University and Niilo Mäki –Institute, Biophysicist Peter Ferreira and Doc. Ron Rosedale. Consequently, it is obvious that different neurobiological developmental disorders or deficits in the function of the body, health problems and diseases have their origin in the dysfunction of the sense of balance. It's been interesting and rewarding to observe these matters from many different points of views. But so far, there has been no comprehensive research on the effect of the sense of balance on the human body. I hope professionals and researchers in any branch of human science would cooperate and study these aspects more carefully with the help of modern technology. As far as I can see, it is possible that there may be some structural malformation of different degree (e.g. narrowness or even blocks) in the canals of the sense of balance, which are likely be connected with the more serious risks for health. The following chapter 1 The structure of the sense of balance |