Frequently Asked Questions
I'm a physical therapist and can assess a person for balance disorders/risk of falling with Tinetti, Berg, DGI and other subjective techniques.
Why do I need a CAPS™ Professional or CAPS™ Lite?
There are a number of reasons why:
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Doing subjective assessments requires not only your expertise, but also a lot of your time. What you have to ask yourself is whether your time is better spent doing time-consuming subjective balance assessments (and getting subjective results) or if it makes more sense for you to use that time, and your expertise, to help your patient get better?
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Those who have switched to CAPS™ Professional or CAPS™ Lite often tell us that one thing they like about having a CAPS™ is that when they were using subjective assessment techniques, it was difficult for them to document how much their patients had actually improved as a result of their interventions. With CAPS™, it’s easy for them to do so.
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Subjective assessment techniques often rely on patient responses to questionnaires. Medical experts now recognize that patients cannot be relied on to tell the truth about their symptoms, and in fact, often do not even recognize their symptoms.
Like many other providers, I need an effective way to get new patients. Will CAPS™ help me do that?
Absolutely. CAPS™ Professional and CAPS™ Lite are the finest marketing tools ever invented. You’ll be amazed at the public response you get, for instance, when you use CAPS™ Professional in public screenings. (A VP at one of the nation’s largest home health companies called it a “sexy” product.) And unlike subjective assessment techniques that sometimes get you only a “deer in the headlights” response from a falls-risk person, when that person fails a CAPS™ screening, they immediately recognize that they have a problem that should be addressed.
Why choose an air caloric irrigator instead of a water caloric one?
Because of these advantages:
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no risk of infections from non-sterile water
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no risks with tympanic perforation
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no need for a source of fresh water
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no tanks to fill
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no water to recover after the irrigation
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no water to dispose of afterwards
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no need for cleaning of tanks and tubing
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ability to visualize the tympanic membrane during irrigation
Furthermore, your patients will be less affected by the air caloric stimulation than they would be if using a water caloric irrigator. In fact, the air stimulation is more progressive and milder than water stimulation. The heat transfer from a flowing fluid to any surface is tens of times larger when the fluid is water compared to air. This can be experienced easily considering that the flow from a hair dryer, easily around 200°F, seems only warm, while water at the same temperature is scalding. For this reason, air caloric irrigators heat the endolymph of the ipsilateral horizontal semicircular canal in a slower, more progressive way than water irrigators. And a slower stimulus is less prone to get the patient too sick.
What differentiates Vestibular Technologies from other force platform manufacturers?
When prospective customers ask us "Who’s your competition?" we tell them "We really don’t have any." Here is why.
Our specialized, patented CAPS™ Professional and CAPS™ Lite (both products are “Patent pending”) reflect our core philosophy “You can’t help them if you don’t know who they are”, a premise that medical experts now recognize as sound.
In fact, such respected medical authorities as the American Geriatric Society, British Geriatric Society and the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons now tell us that people who are at increased risk of falling are often totally unaware that they even have a problem, so they never tell their physician about it. As a result, most falls-risk patients are never identified, assessed, diagnosed and treated -- until it’s too late.
That’s why our CAPS™ Professional and CAPS™ Lite use a specialized protocol that allows anyone to identify a falls-risk person in less than 60 seconds, including data entry (the actual test time is only 25 seconds). Those products and the assessment, diagnosis and treatment protocol used with them were developed by us and patents have been issured to us by the U.S. Patent Office. (Actually, using a force platform and special software to identify an at-risk person in anything less than five (5) minutes is covered by one of our pending patents. That might also explain why other manufacturers have not tried to produce and sell a similar product.)
It’s not only the unique qualities of our products that set us apart from others in our industry; there are also other reasons why we are so different from everyone else. One of them is the fact that we don’t believe in pushing anyone to buy our products. Unlike many other companies in our industry, we believe our job is to educate and inform, not to sell. We answer all questions openly and directly, regardless of whether the answer helps or hurts our chances of making the sale. And we always encourage prospective customers to do their due diligence thoroughly before buying.
Finally, we are justifiably proud of the level of service we provide -- service that can only be called unparalleled.
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