Notes for owners · Industry playbooks
How vertigo clinics keep patients through a course of therapy
Balance therapy feels like nothing is happening. Give the patient a number to beat, mark it at every visit, show her the line, and ring the one who misses a session.
The GullySales team · Updated 3 Oct 2026 · 7 min read
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Patients leave balance therapy because they cannot see it working. Fix that with a number. At the first assessment, record something the patient understands and can repeat: how many seconds she stands with her feet together and her eyes closed, or how far down the corridor she walks before she reaches for the wall. Write it on her card. Mark it again at each visit and show her the line. A patient watching a figure move stays in the room.
Why patients stop, in their own words
Ask the ones who dropped out and the reasons are not the ones a clinic assumes.
"It was making me worse." Early exercises provoke symptoms, and nobody warned her. "Nothing was happening." Nobody measured anything, so she had only her own feeling to go on, and feelings about dizziness are unreliable. "My son could not keep bringing me." The transport problem was never discussed. "I did not want to say I had stopped doing the exercises at home." Shame, which is the quietest reason of all.
Not one of those is fixed by another reminder message.
Give them a number they can watch
Choose a measure your therapists already take, one that a seventy-year-old can understand without explanation, and make it the spine of the course.
| Visit | What is recorded on her card | What she is shown |
|---|---|---|
| Assessment | The starting figure, in her handwriting if she likes | That this is the line we are going to move |
| Each session | The same measure, same conditions | The previous figure beside today's |
| Mid-course | The figures so far, read out | Where it rose, and where it stalled |
| Last session | The first figure and the last | What to keep doing at home, and what to watch for |
Keep the same test, the same shoes, the same corner of the room. A measure that moves because the conditions changed teaches her nothing and she will know it.
The home exercise sheet nobody does
Eight exercises on a printed A4 sheet is a sheet that goes in a drawer. Two exercises, written in the language she speaks, is a routine she might keep.
Better still, record the therapist doing them on a phone, forty seconds, with her name said at the start, and send it to the family's WhatsApp with her consent. An older patient will not open a PDF. She will play a video that a relative found for her.
Speak to the person who drove her
For example, a balance clinic in Nagpur that takes referrals from two neurologists and a physician. The details are illustrative. Most of its older patients arrive with an adult child who waits outside, pays, and knows nothing about what was found.
Bring that person in for the last five minutes. Tell them the finding, the plan and the number of visits the clinician expects. Give them the home exercise video. Ask them to agree the dates in their own calendar before leaving the building, because transport is the reason the third session is missed, not the therapy.
Say when a course is not needed
A patient whose dizziness comes from a particular positional problem may be substantially better after one or two visits and does not need a long course. Say so, bill for what was done, and let her go.
This feels like leaving money on the table. It is the single strongest thing a balance clinic can do for its referral list, because the physician who sent her hears about it and sends the next one. A clinic that puts every patient on the same package gets found out, and the referrals dry up without anyone saying why.
Make it easy for a doctor to send a dizzy patient
Physicians, neurologists and physiotherapists have patients they have run out of answers for. They do not know you test balance properly, because nobody told them.
One page, dropped off in person: what you test, what the equipment shows, what you treat, what you do not treat, and a number that books an appointment without a queue. Then a short note back on every patient they send. The note is the whole thing. A clinic that writes back gets the next patient, and the one after that.
What to do next
Pull the files of every patient who started therapy since the beginning of the year and mark where each one stopped. If they cluster at the second or third session, the problem is that nothing was measured and nobody was driving her. GullySales will map that drop-off with you in the free audit, a 90-minute call that ends in a written report, scored and ranked by what to fix first.