Timothy C. Hain, MD and Marcello Cherchi, M.D, Ph.D. of Chicago Dizziness and Hearing
Page last modified: September 30, 2022
Updates to MdDS treatments (9/30/2022)
New page on galvanic stimulation for bilateral vestibular loss
Click off symptoms on these web forms to see if one fits the published criteria for PPPD, MdDS, or vestibular migraine.
Our Meniere's page was ranked as the most reliable web page on Meniere's, by an article in an Otolaryngology journal evaluating 50 web sites on Meniere's disease (Bojrab et al, 2020). Our score for reliability was 2.96, compared to (for example), Mayo clinic's page which scored 2.63 (which was Google ranked #1). The maximum score is 3. We suspect if other pages on our site were ranked similarly, they would also score at the top for reliability because of our practice of supplying evidence for almost all factual statements, and separating opinion from evidence. We have recently seen pages from major institutions making rather outrageous claims -- we think because the pages are being edited by persons who are good at web design, but perhaps not experts in dizziness. Some pages from academic institutions even make explicit disclaimers that they are not responsible for the content on their site.
Ranking of pages by Google is based more on suitability for serving advertisements than content. Most pages must be "mobile ready", meaning that you should be able to look up -- lets say -- Meniere's disease, on your cellphone. So we are basically comparing content with the reliability score, with appearance (which is a huge portion of the Google score), with appearance winning over reliable information.
Chicago Dizziness and Hearing has a gigantic clinical database containing about 30,000 patient records going back to 1990, mainly concerning conditions including dizziness. We recently have developed tools to explore this database, and we are now beginning to update pages on this site with the aggregate results. We often have about 10 times the patients with particular diagnoses reported by others in the literature.