Over the past four months, I’ve been suffering from periodic bouts of vertigo. It started on Halloween Day last year: I woke up with the world spinning! Imagine someone grabbing a globe and spinning it hard.

It’s difficult to convey how much this messes with your head. Battling nausea, suffering hot and cold flashes, and being unable to move, because moving your head the wrong way will kick off another round.

And while the vertigo can improve, the after-effects are awful: days-to-weeks of “hangover”, where you feel “wrong”, “off”. Brain fog? And the sense that any wrong step could tip you back into full-on vertigo again.

For many people, this is a condition called Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. It could also be Labrynthitis, where an infection gets into your inner ear. My ear-nose-throat specialist diagnosed me with both conditions on subsequent visits.

It’s difficult to convey how debilitating this condition is. I have been taking betahistine three times a day for this whole time, which is the only known medicine for treating the symptoms of vertigo. However, it’s not known how it works, and for many people it’s not effective. Thankfully, it appears to be working for me, despite occasional setbacks. There’s also a maneuver that you can practice daily, which is intended to move the crystals that have come loose in your inner ear, taking them out of the range where they cause your brain to flip out.

The sentiment that I gather from my own reading on this subject has been as depressing as the condition itself. Many people appear to be occassional victims of BPPV. As I’ve mentioned it to friends and family, I often heard tell of people they knew who had had it as well.

And the attitude I hear about vertigo is also depressing. Like this New York Times article, which seems to think it’s a minor inconvenience easily alleviated by tilting your head a bit.

With a condition that seems so pervasive, and is so entirely debilitating, I find it painful to contemplate how we seem to have so little that we can do for it.

And there are many conditions like that. Endometriosis? Chronic fatigue? ADHD? Fibromyalgia? Medical science has a LONG way to go. Sure, we’re living in the future, with face computers, pocket computers, nuclear fusion and moon rockets. But the human body is still so largely misunderstood.

Hopefully soon, my condition will dissipate and it’ll back to hacking and living like I’ll live forever. In the meantime, let’s spare a wish for advancements in medical science.