Welcome to the All About Audiology podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Lilach Saperstein and on today’s episode, we’re going to be talking a lot about balance, not only about actual physical balance, like how we make our body and space, but also a lot of different ways that we can balance how we show up in the world for our kids, for our patients, for our students. And I have with me a very special guest, Michelle Riddle from British Columbia, that’s in Canada, hahaha, for those of you who are from New York, like me, just joking, and don’t necessarily know your geography. Anyway, Michelle Riddle is an occupational therapist, and also a registered holistic nutritionist. And she is going to share with us about a very interesting triad, like a three part paradigm. So, let’s welcome Michelle to the show.

LS: “Welcome, Michelle, thanks so much for coming on the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.”

MR: “Yeah, hi, my name is Michelle Riddle. I’m an occupational therapist and registered holistic nutritionist. I am an instructor at Vancouver Island University and my passion is brain development. I have a company called Resilient Health and the goal is to be able to help people, especially our kids, develop in the way that is the best for themselves, to achieve their potential and bring that forward throughout their life.

Thank you so much for having me here today. This is really exciting. Yeah, the Visual-Vestibular-Auditory Triad, so there’s a three part series there that is necessary for us to be able to process information and to learn. And it’s a really interesting group of sensory organs. Because we have our eyes that are taking in the information from what we’re seeing in our environment, but they also have muscles and how the eyes move in space determines how we perceive what we’re looking at, how we can track visually, and how we can judge distances. Then we have our ears for hearing and also for registering vibration. And in the inside of our ears, we have the vestibular system. And this system is a wonderful system that ties that whole triad together.

So, with that triad, we need it to be able to control movement. We need it to be able to figure out where we are in space, to give us a three dimensional view of the world. Also to feel secure and stable. When our body is dealing with gravity all the time, if we’re not in control of our postural muscles, our brain senses that there’s something kind of off, what are we doing? How do we manage this? So, there can be an emotional component as well within this whole system. The three units, the visual system, the vestibular system and the auditory system all share the eighth cranial nerve. And there needs to be noise from the vestibular system along this nerve for the brain to really process the information from all of these systems.

LS: “Wow. That’s a lot, so, we’re gonna break that down. Let’s start from the beginning. First of all, what is an occupational therapist for those who don’t know exactly, specifically. I think a lot of people think oh, OT (occupational therapist) will help you hold a pencil. An OT will help children who have low muscle tone, maybe those are things that are commonly known about OT, but actually, we are big fans of interdisciplinary care. And there’s a lot of overlap between audiologists and speech pathologists for sure, those are super close. We’re always talking about communication. But we also have a big relationship together with OTs and PTs (physical therapist) for the vestibular system,