Bad Experience with Julian Cowan Hill

[Michael Leigh]

is SO RIGHT. No way around it, Michael Leigh is a waste of space on the internet. Repeating the same

The person you refer to as being so right believes the rubbish that ENT doctors tell their patients about tinnitus. They are physicians not tinnitus specialists. They treat underlying medical problems within the auditory system that is causing the tinnitus. It is for the reason, people with noise induced tinnitus, are referred Audiology to a Hearing Therapist or Audiologist that specialises in NIT. At least this is what happens in the UK. Some (but not all) of these health professionals, were either born with tinnitus or acquired it at some time in their life. The only way a person can know and understand NIT is to experience it. This is the reason so many members in this forum that have noise induced tinnitus, say their ENT doctor has no understanding about the condition.

Michael

 

[JohnAdams]

Jim Jones

 

[linearb]

@JohnAdams wasn't there some guy a while ago who claimed with zero evidence that Sea Anemone would cure tinnitus? So, with this video, we come full circle

 

[JohnAdams]

@JohnAdams wasn't there some guy a while ago who claimed with zero evidence that Sea Anemone would cure tinnitus? So, with this video, we come full circle

 

[Juan]

If people deserved to be sued for making factually insane statements on the internet, I would never not be suing people from this forum and basically everywhere else I go online. I'd probably have to sue myself several times.

Freedom of speech means you can express your dumb, unscientific ideas. You can even set up a monetized YouTube channel to do so. I think the alternatives are worse.

But you cannot charge people for no treatment, and do so knowing that their medical problems won't be fixed. I think it is legitimate that someone says "I can offer you help, but I don't guarantee if it will be successful", but a very different thing is stating that you can cure or alleviate tinnitus for sure... it is all a matter of details, and the wording used.

 

[linearb]

But you cannot charge people for no treatment, and do so knowing that their medical problems won't be fixed. I think it is legitimate that someone says "I can offer you help, but I don't guarantee if it will be successful", but a very different thing is stating that you can cure or alleviate tinnitus for sure... it is all a matter of details, and the wording used.

Where does he offer to cure tinnitus for a fee?

He sells premium content through an app, and he sells skype sessions that provide

• Body-based focusing
• Techniques and coping strategies
• Agony Uncle Service e.g. bring your worst fears and find reassurance and answers to some questions
• Lifestyle advice on what activities help

Nowhere does this say "a cure for your tinnitus", in fact "coping strategies" rather implies the opposite, no? Of course, then that would be at odds with his statement that tinnitus is a temporary state in all cases.

The third bullet point should set off some alarm bells but also makes it kind of clear what's really being sold.

 

[Agrajag364]

If people deserved to be sued for making factually insane statements on the internet, I would never not be suing people from this forum and basically everywhere else I go online. I'd probably have to sue myself several times.

Freedom of speech means you can express your dumb, unscientific ideas. You can even set up a monetized YouTube channel to do so. I think the alternatives are worse.

Some randomer on the Internet posting factually incorrect statements is very different to someone putting up factually incorrect statements and asking for (and getting) money on the basis of these statements.

 

[Autumnly]

Nowhere does this say "a cure for your tinnitus"

• he mentions several times that he went "back to silence" and implies he can help you achieve the same
• he calls tinnitus a temporary condition yet again which goes to show he's convinced everyone can get rid of it (most importantly he doesn't mention any exceptions )
• he says you can learn to "calm" the ringing
• he wrote "I let go of my tinnitus and you can let go of yours"
• source

He can't just outright say he can cure it, he won't use that term but he will use any other description that is implying exactly that.

 

[linearb]

Some randomer on the Internet posting factually incorrect statements is very different to someone putting up factually incorrect statements and asking for (and getting) money on the basis of these statements.

How? "Some randomer", if we're talking about YouTube (which we specifically are in this case) -- that content is implicitly monetized. The craziest stuff Julian says doesn't hold a candle to the craziest monetized content on YouTube, by a lot.

To the extent any of that has been pursued it's been by Alphabet themselves, with policy changes and monitoring. I'm aware of very few cases where people have been successfully sued over non-IP-related YouTube content.

He can't just outright say he can cure it, he won't use that term but he will use any other description that is implying exactly that.

I'd say he's convinced he knows where the line is, in terms of what he can and can't say, and is very clear in the paid services statements that "cure", "silence", etc are words that are not used. I've consistently said I find all sorts of things about this questionable to shady, just nowhere near the bar for legally actionable in the US. The UK has much stricter controls on libel, but I'm not aware of UK content controls that make this kind of thing different; someone feel free to correct me on that because most of my exposure to it is GDPR compliance related and nothing to do with services provided.

Also, tinnitus is a temporary condition for some significantly nonzero population because I have met 5-6 people who had it for weeks to ~a couple years, at some point years in the past, with no recurrence. I also know one person who gets it every fall and believes it's allergy related. So, there's a wide spectrum of experiences, and, uh, maybe the typical long-term poster here isn't really likely to be a good mark for what Julian is selling.

 

[Michael Leigh]

I'd say he's convinced he knows where the line is, in terms of what he can and can't say, and is very clear in the paid services statements that "cure", "silence", etc are words that are not used. I've consistently said I find all sorts of things about this questionable to shady, just nowhere near the bar for legally actionable in the US.

I agree with you. This man is no fool and before submitting any information on his website about tinnitus, I'm sure he would have got lawyers to advise on what he can and can't say legally.

 

[JohnAdams]

View attachment 33893 View attachment 33894View attachment 33895

• he mentions several times that he went "back to silence" and implies he can help you achieve the same
• he calls tinnitus a temporary condition yet again which goes to show he's convinced everyone can get rid of it (most importantly he doesn't mention any exceptions )
• he says you can learn to "calm" the ringing
• he wrote "I let go of my tinnitus and you can let go of yours"
• source

He can't just outright say he can cure it, he won't use that term but he will use any other description that is implying exactly that.

 

[DaveFromChicago]

To Autumnly:

Once again, very insightful.

Six years ago when I got this and watched JCH what most concerned me was such slippery, chimeral rhetoric.

He operates like one of those quick change three card monte or shell game con artists who so rapidly change that you cannot pin down their position or meaning.

He will, for example, describe the "cure" as no longer having an adverse reaction to it although he omits commentary that it actually disappears.

I recall that the title of his book is "Tinnitus: From Tyrant to Friend."

You accurately quoted all of the seemingly positive but actually substanceless and contentless neologisms he frequently employs that skate just one scintilla short of a procedural, step-by-step cure.

To divert your attention and avoid a flat out presentation of a cure, he will range from yoga to deep breathing to meditation to nutrition to cranial sacral massage to (unbelievably) foot massage (as if that had anything to do with tinnitus) to psychotheraputic "working out" of deep-seated conflicts (as if recognition of unconscious "blockage" could alleviate tinnitus) to (even) laughing, sighing, yawning, etc.

P.T. Barnum would have recognized his methods.

However, all con artists eventually trip themselves up and are exposed as unprincipled shams.

 

[just1morething]

I don't see how JCH can fix damage to our auditory system. I wake up to noise every day. I think mine was caused by an airplane barotrauma in my left ear.

He has to live with a guilty conscience if he takes advantage of desperate people he knows he can't help. He probably has as many referrals as that LumoMed laser place in Florida has. He'll probably claim it's a violation of HIPAA laws.

 

[Barbara777]

He has to live with a guilty conscience if he takes advantage of desperate people he knows he can't help.

I unfortunately think the worst scammers like JCH genuinely believe that they're doing God's work. They're narcissistic and don't have a guilty conscience. I hope I'm wrong about him.

 

[JohnAdams]

I unfortunately think the worst scammers like JCH genuinely believe that they're doing God's work. They're narcissistic and don't have a guilty conscience. I hope I'm wrong about him.

Growing up with a "spiritually enlightened" cult leader witch stepmom that was 100% full of shit and 100% full of herself has me of the opinion that you are 100% right.

 

[Ed209]

Hi everyone,

I had a really bad counselling experience with Julian Cowan Hill and thought I am going to share it here.

Hill has a big presence on YouTube where he has posted hundreds of videos about tinnitus and treats people with craniol sacral body work, tinnitus counselling and psychotherapy. He emphasises bodywork and relaxation and as I am a yoga teacher I thought I was on a wave length with him. But I have come away from 2 sessions of counselling with a very bad feeling. Talk about adding insult to injury!

Here is what happened:

- Hill asked virtually no questions as to the onset, development and coping strategies of my tinnitus, so I told him how I had used the relaxation exercises that I know from yoga. Not even 5 minutes into the session he declared that what I considered states of relaxation were actually states of stress. He repeated that throughout the two sessions that I had on several occasions.
- He insisted repeatedly that I had to be "settled" by a professional body worker and that I could not do this alone (despite the fact that I am yoga teacher for 30 years and have helped countless people into deep states of relaxation, myself included)
- When I said that I was cautious about hands-on healing and that I had bad experiences with that he declared that I "had issues with trusting people and needed to learn to trust more". Remember, he did not know me at all, he just blurted these things out without looking for any evidence in my behaviour or what I had told him about my general psychological make up (almost nothing).
- In no way did he try to look for my strengths in order to advise me how to use them to cope with my tinnitus but, to the contrary, he demolished what I thought were my strengths by pathologising them, which left me weakened in confidence and hurt.
- He did not give me one piece of tailor-made advice that I could not have found in his videos. Instead, he simply droned on just repeating the same stuff that he says in his videos. I had to really interrupt him a number of times to try to get the conversation back to my individual situation but that often resulted in him criticising and pahologising me without any real evidence because he was not interested in my personal story at all.
- He made dodgy comments like: tinnitus produces a "buzzy charge" in the head and that he had the capacity to remove this charge through his hands on healing.
- When I asked him how I should mask (a very important aspect for coping with tinnitus which I struggled with) he simply said, listen to music when you feel like it but not when you want to mask the tinnitus. As if this was possible when you feel tormented by a screeching sound in your head. His lack of empathy was staggering.
- When I asked him what kind of recovery time I could expect he boastfully declared that you could be cured of tinnitus in 10 minutes if you knew what you were doing.

All in all, I came away from the two sessions bruised and being exploited by a real snake oil seller. I have never experienced anything like that in my life and I have seen a number of healing practitioners over the years.

Please let me know if anybody had similar experiences with Hill, so that other people are hopefully warned.

Regarding my tinnitus, I found much improvement with searching for triggers and eliminating them, acupuncture and in recent times with the principles TRT.

That sounds like a bad experience so it's good that you've written about it for the benefit of others on here. If I were you, I'd try to put this behind you and move on as best you can. I don't agree with monetising people's suffering without a sufficient degree of evidence that one's treatment works, and I've always said this. The only real evidence-based talking therapy is CBT and I'm not sure if Julian provides this privately or not. Craniosacral therapy has no evidence, whatsoever, to have a clinically significant therapeutic effect, although, I'm sure it's relaxing. His YouTube videos are relatively harmless as they are free, but some might say that they demean other tinnitus sufferers. This, however, depends upon one's perspective. Also, as far as I can remember, JCH is profoundly deaf and has to lip-read people to fully understand them. I'm sure this happened after a severe acoustic trauma from a speaker at a carnival or something like that.

I think the moral of the story here is to always research the credentials of a healthcare professional before handing over any money. It's also a wise move to seek out testimonials from people who have already received treatment from the person in question.

When I had to have major chest surgery (long story), I had many many complications, one such complication nearly killed me after a metal bar that was inside me nearly pierced my heart. I was young at the time and felt like the surgeon the NHS was offering me was my only choice, even though I wanted a different procedure based on my extensive research at the time. After a lot of thought, I took the NHS option. If I'd have gone private, it would have cost me around £33,000 which at the time was a million miles away from being affordable. In the end, I needed another procedure to correct all the tissue damage the first surgeon had caused so I went private. The guy I picked had many forum testimonials, and when I went to see him, he offered me some real-life testimonials as well, if I wanted them. He was very honest and forthright and I ended up having a very positive experience with him. I suppose the point I'm making is that I did a lot of background research and I'd recommend that everyone else be just as thorough, especially if one is thinking of having a medical procedure done. I've seen enough "botched bodies" programs to see how many unscrupulous Drs there are in the world. Some are horrendous. I remember one case of a Dr promising to change someone's eye colour and then nearly blinded them!

The only advice I can give you about tinnitus is to give it a lot of time. There is nothing out there right now that is known to objectively lower tinnitus, so we can only really work on our emotional response to it. If someone online is promising that they can objectively lower your tinnitus then treat it as highly suspect and ask them for clinical evidence. They avoid these kinds of questions like the plague. Some will feed you a load of pseudoscience so don't fall for it.

 

[DaveFromChicago]

To vermillion and other interested members:

I listened to Joey Remenyi's lecture and it is only just a more sophisticated version of JCH's rhetoric.

Essentially, she claims that "neuroplasticity" occurs when you neutralize your reaction to tinnitus; allegedly an utterly emotion-free response will "starve" the tinnitus sensation and teach the brain to diminish it.

Conversely, "obsessive attention" (including even the scientific inquiries on this site) will only feed and inflame the response.

It seems as if, like every other "tinnitus-solution" purveyor, she does not want to lose potential clients by admitting to the possible efficacy of alternative therapies.

She claims to be a certified audiologist, and at least ends her lecture with the caveat that she will determine if her methods will help you after one initial discussion (which is far more forthright than JCH's ridiculousness).

I also noted that she has blocked all commentary.

Her superficially impressive but hackneyed, pseudo-scientific presentation has, however, resulted in 268,000 hits on her YouTube site.

 

[ThomasC]

To vermillion and other interested members:

I listened to Joey Remenyi's lecture and it is only just a more sophisticated version of JCH's rhetoric.

Essentially, she claims that "neuroplasticity" occurs when you neutralize your reaction to tinnitus; allegedly an utterly emotion-free response will "starve" the tinnitus sensation and teach the brain to diminish it.

Conversely, "obsessive attention" (including even the scientific inquiries on this site) will only feed and inflame the response.

It seems as if, like every other "tinnitus-solution" purveyor, she does not want to lose potential clients by admitting to the possible efficacy of alternative therapies.

She claims to be a certified audiologist, and at least ends her lecture with the caveat that she will determine if her methods will help you after one initial discussion (which is far more forthright than JCH's ridiculousness).

I also noted that she has blocked all commentary.

Her superficially impressive but hackneyed, pseudo-scientific presentation has, however, resulted in 268,000 hits on her YouTube site.

Can they support their own theory with scientific evidence?
They can't.

 

[aldog]

I have also encountered this Joey Remenyi:



Who also "heals" tinnitus by private counselling:

https://www.seekingbalance.com.au/beautiful-balance/

Check out her videos. She has turned-off YouTube video commenting (we can all guess why).

To hell with them!

This woman has the comments off. For me she is another vulture on the internet that wants money at the expense of suffering and also sells books and CDs.

 

[JohnAdams]

There is nothing out there right now that is known to objectively lower tinnitus, so we can only really work on our emotional response to it

Lenire?

 

[DaveFromChicago]

Update Regarding Julian Cowan Hill:

In his latest video he claims that he recently attended a "Tinnitus Master Class at the Ear Institute of London."

Interestingly, he has drastically reduced his claims that his methods will result in 100% cures.
He is now quoting only a partial success rate for 8 out of 13, or in another sampling 6 out of 10 clients.

In fact, he said that some clients only sustained silence for "2 days per week" or for "a portion of each day for 4 days a month" (that's all?!).

Also, he admitted that there were "slower responders" and for the first time we heard that cranial sacral massage "may not work for everyone".

I am curious about why for the first time after 153 videos he has approached a far less grandiose and a far more realistic assessment of his methods (although his reduced claims are probably still overblown.)

If he really attended such a conference with personages on a level with Dr. Shore or Dr. Rauschecker, I can easily see why he was compelled to deconstruct and modify his previously absurd assurances of total cures for every variant of this condition.

 

[Autumnly]

In his latest video he claims that he recently attended a "Tinnitus Master Class at the Ear Institute of London."

Did he mention which Tinnitus Master Class exactly he's talking about? There was a three-day CPD-accredited Masterclass from 21 January - 23 January 2020 directed by Roland Schaette & Lucy Handcomb but there are also Masterclasses by Dr. Hashir Aazh (who also talks about "Adverse childhood experiences and tinnitus disability" !?).

 

[ajc]

Did he mention which Tinnitus Master Class exactly he's talking about? There was a three-day CPD-accredited Masterclass from 21 January - 23 January 2020 directed by Roland Schaette & Lucy Handcomb but there are also Masterclasses by Dr. Hashir Aazh (who also talks about "Adverse childhood experiences and tinnitus disability" !?).

Dr. Hashir Aazh's scam course is in July, 2020.

The Ear Institute which Julian Scam Hill mentioned in his video is part of the UCL. The dates match with his video too.

== Julian attended the CPD-accredited Masterclass directed by Dr. Schaette.

 

[mrbrightside614]

Bro get the fuck out of here @J Cowan Hill.

 

[Jazzer]

Update Regarding Julian Cowan Hill:

In his latest video he claims that he recently attended a "Tinnitus Master Class at the Ear Institute of London."

Interestingly, he has drastically reduced his claims that his methods will result in 100% cures.
He is now quoting only a partial success rate for 8 out of 13, or in another sampling 6 out of 10 clients.

In fact, he said that some clients only sustained silence for "2 days per week" or for "a portion of each day for 4 days a month" (that's all?!).

Also, he admitted that there were "slower responders" and for the first time we heard that cranial sacral massage "may not work for everyone".

I am curious about why for the first time after 153 videos he has approached a far less grandiose and a far more realistic assessment of his methods (although his reduced claims are probably still overblown.)

If he really attended such a conference with personages on a level with Dr. Shore or Dr. Rauschecker, I can easily see why he was compelled to deconstruct and modify his previously absurd assurances of total cures for every variant of this condition.

Julian Cowan Hill has a cultured voice, an avuncular manner, a beard, and the ability to generate lots of money.

He does not, however, have any cure for tinnitus.

 

[BigNick]

I haven't tried TRT but Isobel Anderson (You Tube) says it was great for her.

I have no experience of cranio therapy either but Nick Heyward (80s pop star) said on Instagram recently it lowered his tinnitus alot.

 

[carlover]

I saw Julian Cowan Hill 10 years ago. To be honest I found him a decent guy. He said to me with my training in Chi Kung I didn't need to spend money with him, just use my Chi Kung every day to calm the adrenaline. He may be wrong on the adrenaline but he was straight with me. I speak as I find. Listen no one has the answer to tinnitus. No supplement, no Mickey Mouse thing you stick in your ears. You either have it bad or you have it not so bad or it goes on its own and if it's not so bad you can "habituate" -- that's it... that's the party.

 

[Rajin]

Shame on Julian Cowan Hill, taking advantage of people suffering. I watched one of his videos and knew it was all fake, seriously. Never liked anything he posted. Common sense told me this. Just a bad feeling about him.

 

[KyleM]

Meh he promotes the idea of promoting relaxation and meditation which does help with the emotional response to tinnitus. His videos really did help me stay calm and feel like there was light at the end of the tunnel during the darkest times (the beginning). If he kept his message only to that point maybe he wouldn't get such a bad wrap.

But I don't think I'd pay money to have him touch my body in random places.

 

[Juan]

Dr. Hashir Aazh's scam course is in July, 2020.

The Ear Institute which Julian Scam Hill mentioned in his video is part of the UCL. The dates match with his video too.

== Julian attended the CPD-accredited Masterclass directed by Dr. Schaette.

In the UK there are a bunch of people living on "researching" or writing books about tinnitus or hyperacusis, like David Baguley. Do they know anything about tinnitus or hyperacusis? Of course not, but they make money or receive grants and research money for this. And their books are useless... full of wrong statements.