Tinnitus [ Ringing in the ears ]

[dave1234]

Hi

I suffer from tinnitus [ ringing in the ears ], which was brought about by exposure to loud sounds. I live in the States and there are some promising new treatments in the pipeline. One of them involves using an MP3 player and listening to certain sounds embedded amongst music. The idea is to re-train the brain. I spoke to the American Tinnitus Association on the west coast, and they said that some veterans coming back from the wars have had quite good success with it. According to the latest figures, one third of all US vets coming back have some form of hearing problem.


Have read several reviews – most are pretty good.

I’m going to try it myself later on in the year once I get some other health problems resolved.


Might be worth checking into for anyone with this problem.

Here is the link:

http://www.neuromonics.com/

I’ve managed to get my tinnitus reduced by about 50% [ from a point where I just wanted to walk in front of a bus ]. I can live with it now, but am still working on getting it reduced more. If anyone with tinnitus wants some help, drop me a line and I'll share what I did to get the level of noise reduced.


Cheers

Dave

[anglo-saxon]

I've had tinnitus for the last 20 years. It's like having a tuning fork in your head. The worst part is there is no such thing as peace and quiet any more. I would pay good money to get rid of at least some of it. I manage to tune some of it out and don;t notice it when I'm busy, but it is always there!

I read a book about sound therapy about 15 years ago. It was developed in a monostary in Saskatchewan (at least, that method was). What they did was record clasical music onto very high quality metal tapes (I did say it was 15 years ago!) and filter out the harful frequencies, leaving only the "good" ones (whatever that means). It looked very interesting and I also read good reviews about the results in many people, but it was just too damned expensive for me at the time, so I resigned myslef to just biting the bullet. If this new technology provides somehting as good or better, but cheaper, I'm in!

Thanks for the post!

[Hyperlithe]

One of our guys was grounded for at least 6 months due to tinnitus. I have no idea what was causing it in his case, but I guess he was really lucky because it just stopped one day!
I can imagine it would drive you mad, glad there are things out there that seem to help.

[Wholley]

I also suffer from Tinnitus altough mine is a little more complex.

Clock this.
http://www.t-gone.com/menieres-disease.htm

Up until a few years ago I could leap tall buildings in a single bound,now I get vertigo standing on a high curb.

[adamb]

Wholley over the last month or so i have been getting dizziness attacks. I get a ringing in my ear, my eyes go funny(sometimes seeing a bright light in one eye). As you stated about jumping buildings, up until a month ago i could run up a climbing wall but now i get vertigo and feel dizzy when im watching something like a computer game! I was watching the trailer to 'mirrors edge' and it made me feel sick, asked doctor about it and he refered me to an eye doctor. I went to see him and he told me that i suffered from migranes, now i dont know if it is migranes (as i occasionally get headaches) because the Meniere's you just mentioned i have all the symptoms. Its either 1 of them 2 or its becase im anxious about starting in feb? im not sure? any ideas?

[Ste Preece]

Hi

I suffer from tinnitus [ ringing in the ears ], which was brought about by exposure to loud sounds. I live in the States and there are some promising new treatments in the pipeline. One of them involves using an MP3 player and listening to certain sounds embedded amongst music. The idea is to re-train the brain. I spoke to the American Tinnitus Association on the west coast, and they said that some veterans coming back from the wars have had quite good success with it. According to the latest figures, one third of all US vets coming back have some form of hearing problem.


Have read several reviews – most are pretty good.

I’m going to try it myself later on in the year once I get some other health problems resolved.


Might be worth checking into for anyone with this problem.

Here is the link:

http://www.neuromonics.com/

I’ve managed to get my tinnitus reduced by about 50% [ from a point where I just wanted to walk in front of a bus ]. I can live with it now, but am still working on getting it reduced more. If anyone with tinnitus wants some help, drop me a line and I'll share what I did to get the level of noise reduced.


Cheers

Dave

I have tinitus too. I got it after suffering a serious head injury some years ago. There is a way of temporarily controlling this. Lift the ear lobe with one of your fingers , over the ear hole. Then tap lightly on top of it with another finger. Do this approximately 36 times. Its an eastern practice, but it does work.

Cheers
Steve

[Wholley]

Adam,from what I have found Meniere's is a problem for people of middle-age and above.
Very rare for a person your age,so I think#2 applies in your case.
Could just be an inner ear infection which can disturb your balance and give you headaches.
My best advise is to see your Doc again and get him to dig around in your ears.
You could also check this out.

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/b ... 7/art01122

Hope this helps.

[dave1234]

From my research, I have found four main things that cause Tinnitus:

1. Exposure to loud sounds

2. Stress

3. Tempero-Mandibular Joint problems.

4. Medications

What I have found out as I go along each day with my tinnitus, is that the more I learn about it, the more I am able to deal with it. It was not like this at the beginning. I truly thought I was going to lose my mind. Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t concentrate etc. Now it’s just part of my life, only really bothering me when I get stressed out. Then when that happens, I perform certain recovery techniques that I’ll cover later.

I don’t like heights. When I did my first balloon, I was number three. When that cage rocked as number one and then number two went out, my legs were like jelly. I thought twice about not going out, but the fear of the slagging I would have gotten from my mates drove me out. On the next balloon I did in Edinburgh near Arthur’s Seat the APJI could see from my face I was not a happy camper. He said “Remember knowledge dispels fear..knowledge dispels fear”. I remembered all I had been taught, and it did help a little bit. With tinnitus, I have found that it really helps knowing who you are up against and how he works.

With my spinal problems, I have gone from physically vomiting with worry when I was told about the condition of my back to being at a point now where I say every day to my problems “I know who you are, and I will defeat you”. I say this every day to myself a dozen times.

What I will try to do is to first of all explain how tinnitus is caused, so we can get a good understanding of the “enemy”. I’ll then go through the various treatments that I have found can help. Also, I’ll give a list of recommended books and reading materials.

A doctor told me about my tinnitus “You just have to live with this”. I was already going through some other physical injuries and told him “I don’t HAVE to live with anything. I was told by a doctor last year I’d never walk again, and be paralyzed within two years yet here I am in your office”.

You may not get rid of your tinnitus completely, but I believe that you can reduce it as I have done and learn to live with it.

I’ll cover the first cause [ “Exposure to loud sounds “ ] in this posting.

Our ears are made up of three parts:

Outer ear
Middle ear
Inner ear

http://hearingexperts.ca/images/threeParts.jpg

Outer Ear:
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl= ... 9%26sa%3DN

Sound waves are collected by what we normally just call our ears [ the flaps of flesh on the outside – called the “pinnae” ]. These flaps collect the sound waves and direct them down a little tube until they meet a small window at the end of the tube. This little window is called the “Tympanum” or eardrum. The sound waves make the eardrum vibrate.

Middle Ear:

In the middle ear, there are three little bones called the malleus, incus and stapes.

These are also known as the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup, because they look like those things. These little bones pick up the vibrations and amplify them. They then pass them on to the next part, the inner ear.

Inner Ear: http://www.brainconnection.com/med/meda ... 990702.jpg

The little stirrup bone is attached to a strange looking object called the “cochlea”. This cochlea looks like a snail shell. A small thin “window” is present in the cochlea and when the stirrup vibrates, this sound is transferred inside the cochlea.
The cochlea is filled with fluid. There are a whole series of small hairs inside the cochlea. Each of these little hairs is attached to a nerve. The nerves then lead to the brain.
Whenever a sound wave hits the eardrum, the sound vibrations are transferred to the cochlea. The window then vibrates. This causes the fluid to move. As the fluid moves, the little hairs also move. Whenever the hairs move, they send a signal to the brain which we interpret as sound. Each hair responds to a different frequency of sound. Some move more than others depending on the frequencies present in the sound.

An interesting thing about the ear is that it does not respond equally to different frequencies.
For example, let’s say we take an electronic box called a signal generator and send out a tone of sound at one frequency [ like a musical note for example ]. We set the power coming out and send out the tone. We then ask someone to note how loud it sounds.
We then take the same signal generator and send out another tone, much higher in frequency [ or pitch ] than the second one, but with exactly the same power level and ask the same person to compare the two sounds. The person will always notice a difference. The ear does not respond to all sounds equally.

The big problem is that those little hairs are very delicate and can be easily damaged. I went to a clinic recently and saw a photograph taken with a special microscope of the hairs of someone who has suffered hearing loss. You could see some of the little hairs completely broken off and others that were bent. The ones that were bent are the main ones that cause tinnitus.
When there is no sound, healthy hairs stand at 90 degrees to the surface of the inner ear. They do not move, so they do not activate the nerves to which they are attached. The brain does not detect any sound. However, when the hairs are bent, and sound comes in, the nerves do not send a pure frequency to the brain, but instead send “static” . This static is like the sound from an untuned radio.

Imagine a river estuary [ the inside of the inner ear ] that leads out to the sea. On the bottom of the estuary are reeds [ hairs ] and sea-grass. When the tide [ sound waves ] is neither coming in or going out, the reeds stand straight in the water. When the tide comes in, the reeds bend. When the tide goes out, the reeds bend again.

Different people hear different sounds with tinnitus. I hear a “whooshing sound” most of the time, but every now and then I get a really high pitched “eeeeeee” which lasts for a few minutes and then is gone.

Loud sounds can cause damage. I can trace mine back [ probably ] to the mortars, and the occasional Wombat going off. Many years ago, someone turned on a speaker close to my head and that really made things bad. Also, certain frequencies of sounds can affect me more than others. I know that when I was flying in a C-130, my ears would “ring” differently than when I was in a Nimrod. In the herc, it was always that low “whom,whom,whom” and the high pitched “Wheee…” when the ramp went up or down. In the Nimrod, I could pick up the really high pitched sounds coming from the electronics above the jet noise. If you have to listen to those sounds constantly, I’m sure that can cause problems.

My muscular therapist Al Meilus, developed his robot to treat his equilibrium problems. Equilibrium and Tinnitus are very closed tied together due to the fact that the balance organs [ the semi-circular canals ] are attached to the cochlea.

http://www.science.psu.edu/alert/images ... canals.jpg

http://www.colorado.edu/intphys/Class/I ... /10-23.jpg

Here’s Al’s story:

http://www.meilus.com/Bio.asp

In the next posting, I’ll cover stress [ a really big problem, but there are some simple techniques to help ].

Cheers

Dave

[Hyperlithe]

I've already been warned to expect both my hearing and eyesight to deteriorate over time because of the conditions while flying.
Luckily they're starting from a pretty high level, but that will be no comfort when I go to the optician for my first pair of glasses...

[dave1234]

Here is a link for the American Tinnitus Association. It’s well worth while e-mailing them. Can’t remember the lady’s name who does the replies but she’s very helpful and prompt.

http://www.ata.org/

Here’s an article about tinnitus and veterans:

http://www.ata.org/action-alliance/support-for-veterans

On a separate issue, I’ve haven’t had a good laugh in a really long time. I saw references on the forum to “Arrse” and thought I’d check it out. I started reading “Arrsepedia” at 10:00 p.m. last night and finished at 5:00 a.m. this morning. I haven’t laughed so much in years. My wife came downstairs to see what all the fuss and noise was about. Just brilliant. I nearly went cross-eyed jumping to all the cross-references they have. Lovely one about Piers Morgan and a Martini. Just what I needed.

Cheers

Dave

[anglo-saxon]

Lift the ear lobe with one of your fingers , over the ear hole. Then tap lightly on top of it with another finger. Do this approximately 36 times. Its an eastern practice, but it does work.

Cheers
Steve

...also an excellent way to ensure you have plenty of room on the bus!

[dave1234]

Stress is one of the major things that can cause an increase in tinnitus, and in some cases actually trigger tinnitus. When we get stressed, our blood pressure increases and this increased pressure against nerves can cause the level of noise to increase. I have always had a pretty short fuse, but over the last few years, have been learning how to control it. There are several good techniques to reduce the effects of stress that I will talk about in the next posting.

Medication. I was astonished to read the number of cases of people who had no tinnitus, but then suffered badly with it after taking certain medications.

The following list give some of the biggest culprits. You may have to “google” to find the UK names and equivalents of some of these medicines. There are many more, which can be found with a google search.

http://www.sinuswars.com/tinnitus/Certa ... cation.asp

http://ezinearticles.com/?Is-Your-Heari ... id=1172883

http://www.allabouttinnitus.com/medicat ... nitus.html



Tempero- Mandibular Joint Disorder. Also Called “TMJ”. This problem affects many people. Where your lower jaw attaches to your skull there are a number of ligaments and as sort of hinge. You have one on either side of your head. When muscles are unbalanced [ I’ll talk about this in the next posting or two ] more pressure gets put on one side than the other. The pressure gets applied applied to the temporal bone which covers the middle and inner ears. There is also a very little known ligament [ a ligament is tissue that connects two bones together ] called Pinto’s ligament. This ligament when tight, can cause tinnitus.

http://www.teethremoval.com/imagess/tmj_anatomy.gif

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&r ... a=N&tab=wi

http://www.gjmurphydds.com/tmd.html

http://www.midwestheadaches.com/symptoms.earpain.asp

TMJ or TMD can cause all sorts of neck and jaw pain [ I’ll cover those issues separately in another posting ].

Dave

[sportbilly42]

...also an excellent way to ensure you have plenty of room on the bus!

I find that smiling widely at people as they get on the bus and patting the empty seat beside you excitedly, also does the trick!


(BTW - I think Dave1234's EXTRA-long URL link above has thrown the page off-cock .......anyone remember how to do the 'linky' thing?)