Meniere’s Disease

Hello Jordan and Austin,

I started having issues with bouts of dizziness in December. Then in January it became constant dizziness along with hearing loss and ringing in my right ear. A month ago I was diagnosed with vestibular migraines and put on 10mg daily of nortriptyline. I got slightly better but not close to normal. Today after a hearing test I was also diagnosed with Ménière’s disease. I was told to keep taking the Nortriptyline and also that I now had to eat a low sodium diet of less than 2000mg a day.

Ok, and … ?

Shit, sorry. Half my post got swallowed up. I went on to say that I still am having enough issues with the dizziness for now when lifting to make it very difficult to bench, press or squat. Deadlifts are manageable so I’ve been doing deadlifts, trap-bar deadlifts and Chins along some pushups and shorter conditioning stuff just to get work in. But my main questions aren’t related to training through it for now. Im more concerned long term and I was more curious if you’d had any experience training anyone with this and what my expectations should be. My doctor said it could possibly start to improve within a few weeks of implementing this diet and it’s usually an episodic thing but I was curious if you had any tips related to the training/diet/other for this issue. I also asked him about creatine since the main crux of Meniere’s seems to be fluid retention and that’s why the low sodium diet is prescribed. He said it’s fine but I got the feeling he didn’t really know what it was (just that it isn’t sodium). Might be nothing for you guys to help me with other than saying try the diet and see what happens, but I couldn’t find much on this on the web related to strength training so I was just looking for any additional input you may have from coaching experience.

Thanks,
Bob