So sorry to hear about your daughter. What a horrible thing for a young person to have to endure. I've had the exact same experience with an MRI. It was about three months after my injury, and I was just starting to feel a bit better. I felt an immediate return to cognitive symptoms (disjointed, incomplete, and repetitive thoughts) right after a sequence that involved rapid vibrations of the table (and thus my head). A couple of days later, I had horrible vertigo and I'm continuing to have mild balance issues (vertigo, dizziness and balance were never symptoms of my original injury).

I'm now approaching 6 months post injury and am still having significant cognitive issues. Although there is no way to know for sure, I believe those horrible MRI vibrations have significantly interfered with my recovery. I think anyone getting an MRI for a concussion, should press the "distress button" as soon as they feel their head vibrate. Out of about 8 or 9 sequences in my MRI, only one involved vibrations.

I hope that your daughter recovers soon and that she enjoys a full healthy life ahead of her.

I had this nightmare symptom for two months.. it became so bad i couldnt even sleep in my bed cause the jolting was too much...

You can fix this problem in three steps

chiropractic to put your neck and upper back in position

Massage and ice to relief the swelling

and thirdly exercise your neck

This problem is due to pinched nerves and weak/misaligned neck and upper back

i can walk now and its slowly improving .. but jolting in buss is still annoying


if you follow the steps above you can heal in 2-5 months depending on your age and body

Has anyone else found a cure for this? From the latest responses, I realise that this might be a neck issue. I will start rehabilitating my neck asap. A latest post said that the original post ID Klaus had gotten over it through targeted exposure therapy. @Klaus would you please tell us what this targeted exposure therapy was? Thank you, I will owe you one if someone helps me get through this!

As for people mentioned hyperacusis, I suffer from the same—debilitating noise sensitivity. One sports psychologist told me that it will improve with vestibular therapy, so I am going to try that and will let you all know if it works!

Meanwhile, please post your experiences / suggestions with these jolts causing setbacks, people!!

The last post Klaus made on the subject said the following:

"The best I can do for you is an anecdotal case study of one (that being me ). For many months I was so sensitive to any head movement, vibration or jolting that I had to wear specially cushioned sneakers to walk anywhere or even each step from walking was too much of a jolt.

I have improved a lot since then and continue to do so. I even ran a few steps the other day, and it seems to have been ok. And speed bumps in a car are now ok as long as I lean forward. So if she's like me, it will improve and won't limit her life as much as it now might appear.

I expect it to limit my life in terms of the lifestyle choices I make. I have learned to avoid activities that might jolt me, and intend to continue doing so even if I feel better in the future. I would advise your daughter to plan to do the same, this isn't something she'll want to go through again. There are plenty of fun and worthwhile activities which don't involve head jolts."

I had a similar experience my first bought with this. If you can avoid any setbacks (and you don't hide in your house all day, either), it seems possible for this symptom to kind of improve "on its own."

I would imagine it depends slightly on the cause. I know there are folks on here with neck issues that have needed to be addressed, so it's important to see a good doctor to figure out what is actually going on. For me, it was more of a vestibular thing that was actually diagnosed as migraine-related (see some of my other posts for more detail on that).

What I have found helps this (outside of migraine medication--which I have yet to be successful with, but I'm told by my docs it's possible to control it that way) is what one of my neurologists calls "targeted exposure", which is basically just making yourself a LITTLE bit uncomfortable every day, but not so uncomfortable that it triggers a 6-month setback in symptoms or anything like that.

I have never had a PT who has been able to help me properly with this because, although it's a vestibular issues, they are generally trained to treat the VOR response and issues with turning your head. This is an issue with moving your head lineally, which is a separate organ. There are two in each ear, actually (the utricles and saccules). I found it helpful to read my old college anatomy textbook to understand how they work. It made me understand the sensations I was feeling better.

Anyway, I ended up making up my own "PT" exercises that I've found help me improve much faster than waiting for it to get better "on its own". It's kind of been a progression. I was REALLY sensitive about two years ago, so I started with just squatting up and down slowly (and also lunging forward and back). This felt like an amusement park ride, at the time.

For me, I would do this as fast as I could tolerate (maybe 10-20 times each) until the sensations became painful. I didn't want the pain to linger too long after I was done because I found I wouldn't improve as much day-to-day if it did. Really, what I was trying to do was teach my brain that it needed to get more comfortable with larger amounts of movement.

It was hard at first because I wasn't really comfortable with what my limits were, and I was always so nervous that I pushed too far. You get more confident over time--after you have a few moments of panic where you're sure you triggered a setback and then the symptoms never come. Then you're like, "Oh, I can push at least that hard and know it will be fine."

I wouldn't always notice improvement each day, but it was always noticable week-to-week. Eventually, the squats and lunges got more aggressive and turned into jumps. When jumping on the ground got easier, I bought a small trampoline. I also bought a treadmill to work up to different walking speeds and inclines steadily.

Another thing I noticed, just in general, was that just avoiding all movement made it worse. Like, if I just sat on the couch all day and never went anywhere, I would never get better (and would even regress). This is all consistent with what the doctors have told me will happen with sensory sensitivities related to migraine.

Not sure if this will help! Everyone is different. That was just my experience with it.

Best of luck!

This is the most informative answer I have ever received about the possible therapeutic approaches to treating this. Thank you so much!

PSA: This is not only meant as a reply to Valleybob, it's for anyone here who could find this useful.

I also think the neck plays a role with this sensitivity. I have had a lot of problems with my neck. I used to be extremely sensitive to the slightest jolts, and even just stepping too hard or moving my head too rapidly could increase the symptoms a lot. When I look back, my neck was very weak and inflamed back then. It had become weak from all the bed rest (bad idea), and even before all my PCS/new neck problems I probably had weak neck muscles since I had forward head posture (still have it though) I am sure the are some issues/instability in the upper cervical area too, as is common among people who have experienced a concussion, and as I've come to learn it might be common following years of bad posture. I recommend reading this: Atlas joint instability: Causes, consequences and solutions - MSK Neurology

My symptoms are so much worse when my neck muscles are tight and when there is more inflammation in there, so I have theorized that when I experience jolts and bumps, the inflammation in the neck increases and thereby the symptoms increases as well. Icing the neck helps my symptoms, also eating anti-inflammatory foods and (especially) spices (rosemary, cayenne, pepper, basil etc.) immediately helps a bit too. These things always help me though, so I'm not sure to what degree the symptom improvement is tied to the worsening after a jolt or bump, especially since I started doing it after the most extreme sensitivity faded. I am not entirely sure that neck inflammation is the cause of the sensitivity, and I hope some of you reading this can further test this theory.

Now I don't get the same symptom-increase from jolts, but I still feel very wary of these things. Now I think it's more about my neck being too stiff and the cervical vertebra not being mobile enough. I have had a dynamic x-ray done and they found that most of the joints in my neck were barely moving upon flexion. The upper cervicals and one joint lower in the neck was the ones doing all the bending while the others were very stiff. I think that this, along with neck inflammation and having weak muscles all over my body and neck decreases my body and neck's ability to absorb shocks and impacts. So it feels very uncomfortable to walk without a specific pair of shoes I own with a layer of two soft insoles and an extra layer for the heel.

If you have this kind of extreme sensitivity I highly recommend making your shoes more shock-absorbing by adding insoles. This will prevent you from stiffening up your muscles while walking to try to avoid these symptom-triggering jolts. Tensing up your muscles while walking will make your mucles and spine become more inflexible and stiff and you will feel more shocks when walking.

So anyways, the jolts and shocks doesn't affect my symptoms much anymore. I have even hit my head two times into some branches without getting worsening of symptoms like before - only temporary from the anxiety that followed.

I don't know if it was a coincidence or not, but the period when the sensitivity started to imrpove was when I started eating more anti-inflammatory. There have been people on this forum that has said that it helped their sensitivity, so maybe it can be something to try - it's a very healthy way to eat anyways and it's probably good for your brain.