Mark Cuban: VR treated my dizziness and now I’m patenting the process

After a few months of home treatment with the Samsung VR set, Cuban reported that he's back to "normal and happy." He only needs to put the goggles on once every couple of weeks, just for the sake of maintenance.

NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 09: Mark Cuban Visits Fox News Channel's "Watters' World" at FOX Studios on June 9, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images)

Mark Cuban Visits Fox News Channel’s “Watters’ World” on June 9, 2016 in New York City.

Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and one of the sharks on ABC’s “Shark Tank,” is blowing up social media today for his “billionaire bitch slap” of Donald Trump on the “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” Wednesday night.

But he has a great healthcare-related story to tell, too, about how “virtual reality gave me my brain back.”

Cuban has had bouts with vertigo in the past. That’s what he thought he was experiencing when he woke up dizzy one day last year, the morning after an exhilarating walk through New York City, according to a post on his popular Blog Maverick site. Cuban described what he felt hours later:

My brain was in a fog, I felt hungover. i felt some nausea,  without having had a drink. My face and ears felt full. I can’t fully describe it  or give justice to just how off I felt. My balance was fine. My body below the neck was fine. I never felt better. But inside my head something was definitely wrong.

After weeks of testing and visits to otolaryngologists and a neurologist — plus a prescription for anti-seizure drug Klonopin that only made things worse — Cuban got on Valium just before he headed to Los Angeles to shoot “Shark Tank.” The dizziness subsided, though the drug caused drowsiness.

“But it got me through the first shooting pod of Season 7 of ‘Shark Tank.’ So when you are watching, if you notice I look really, really relaxed and maybe a little tired or sleepy, now you know why,” Cuban said. He knew it wasn’t the long-term answer, though.

He then got referred to Newport-Mesa Audiology Balance and Ear Institute, in Mission Viejo, California. (Props to the Orange County practice for the great URL and homage to a local attraction, www.dizziland.com.)

The practice diagnosed Cuban with a damaged otolith in his inner ear that tricked his brain into thinking the body was unbalanced. For treatment, Executive Director Howard T. Mango, an audiologist, strapped Cuban to a chair in a dark room. As the patient described it:

Dr. Mango had created the special enclosure for the chair, but more importantly, he created a protocol of videos that would be projected against the walls. While I watched the videos there were cameras looking at my eyes, measuring the response of my eyes. It was a solution that he had integrated and it was working.

But Cuban had to go back to Dallas and there wasn’t such an apparatus or treatment available for him there. Cuban offered to buy a chair, hire one of Mango’s audiologists and set up a Dizziland branch in Texas. That didn’t materialize, but the ever-innovative Cuban realized he could create the same kind of therapy on consumer-grade VR equipment:

Why not put the videos on my phone and look at them in the Samsung VR set I had bought just to try to learn more about VR

Bingo.

I started using Dr Mango’s protocol in the Samsung VR Glasses every morning and every night and started making progress nearly every day. Day after day, night after night I was in my bedroom or a hotel room with my goggles on watching white boxes on a black background scroll past my eyes. My doctors had me standing sometimes. Laying down sometimes. Standing on a pillow in the morning, rolling side to side while watching at night.

After a few months of home treatment with the Samsung VR set, Cuban reported that he’s back to “normal and happy.” He only needs to put the goggles on once every couple of weeks, just for the sake of maintenance.

More importantly, Cuban said he is now working with Mango to patent the process. “Hopefully it can have the same impact on others that it had on me,” he wrote.

Cuban posted this video that he made for the practice:

Photo: John Lamparski/Getty Images

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