@Salt &
@nogood & Everybody..
Hey.. no problem, this post took me a while to complete.. so first about HBOT,
I started the treatment a month after onset. (
@Salt 6 weeks after is not bad at all the recomendations is up to 3 months) after 10 sessions I got about 70% (not 30% as you mentioned) of a drop in T loudness. from then on it might have added just a little bit of improvement and probably more of conservation. I would recommend anybody to get at least 20 sessions of HBOT and to see if there is an improvement, if so then to I would go until 30.
but this is my scenario which is after a sudden hearing loss and
it is a way of making the ear heal better which is stated in the guidelines for treating SHL (ISSHL).
if you do HBOT take NAC as well.
the doctor which is the head of the HBOT and another department in the hospital where I was treated administrate this to all patients. it forces the blood vessels to stay open (very important in your ear right now for the healing) under the oxygen treatment. the oxygen causes them to shrink. they recommended taking NAC 600mg 3 times a day which one of them is 20 min before the session.
they've also recommended Omega3 max 1 time a day. olive oil which I eat everyday anyway and some nuts which I didn't eat.
the HBOT doc also instruct people not to smoke in the days of the treatment.
smoking is such a bad thing .. if you are smoking.. just stop, it takes only 1 month of being strong and you are clean and don't need/want nicotine like the most of the clean world, from my experience.
I think that
NAC is important! I know that in the US army they use NAC for soldires who were exposed to very loud noises to better protect their ears from getting sudden hearing loss (and most likely T with it).
I was advised by another professor to stop drinking caffeine at all for the time of the healing (months)
since caffeine shrinks the blood vessels.
SHL was my scenario
, another scenario story: with me at the HBOT sessions was a lady, maybe in her late 40's and she had some kind of a neurological case where she passed out and after she woke up she had all kinds of phenomenon for months like little pulses of "electricity" in her body and numbness and tingling and T and more.. after 3 months all she had left with was T. 2 frequencies and very loud. she was given all kinds of medications and got to HBOT only about 10 months after onset. we started at about the same time and when I left she didn't have no improvement. but I recently called her to see how she is and she said that she has a permanent improvement after 50 sessions! she said it went down from 7-8 to 4-5 in loudness in a scale of 10. she is happy but she hoped for a better result. this shows that if you have some kind of brain issue it takes a while for HBOT to help, but her improvements are permanent and they took place after so many months of the same loud level of T. so in her case we have to give the credit to HBOT and not like my case where it could be HBOT that helped and could also be spontaneous natural recovery. she also took a SPECT test that showed the issue in the brain from the beginning.
so it depends if you have a brain issue or a cochlea issue or a hearing nerve issue.
I am not a doctor but I'll tell you what I know from what I learned on the way, take it with limited liability.
for brain issues, I've been told by a specialist that HBOT can help even after a few years.
for cochlea issue, I think it's the sooner the better and up to 3 months is the recommendation in the guidelines for SHL. I would do it at up anyway to at least 6 months or maybe even more if it's a bad T.
for hearing nerve issue, I don't know but I think it's more rare and I guess that like at the cochlea issue, HBOT is helping the body to heal better and faster. I also think that Steroids are very important in that case since I heard that if the nerve is getting swollen and while it's passing through a very little hole in the skull, it starts to die as it "chokes" on itself. and steroids take that swollenness down.
if you have some kind of an autoimmune inner ear disease HBOT might be useless, and T could fluctuate and be much better at times and much worst at times depending on how hard is the current attack of the body on itself. (I suspect that this is what I have)
and I assume there are plenty of more causes for T like viruses and what not.. so in most cases it's very hard for physicians to tell you where is
your issue. "Idiopathic" as they say, for no known reason.
but if you will know eventually you might not be able to know until a few months goes by so get HBOT ASAP in case you have what most of the patients have, sudden hearing loss. (ISSHL).
I know only one doctor in my country (Israel) that can tell where is your problem coming from and what is the best thing to do with your T. he usually sends for "ultra high" frequencies hearing test for up to 20KHz and sometimes for tinnitus evaluation and a brain mapping (SPECT) to see if you have any brain issues. most other doctors will just send you away and tell you to "live with it"! I hate that phrase! and I won't! I'll always keep looking for the answer to T and I believe it will be in the form of sound.
TINNITUS CAN ALSO GO AWAY OF IT'S OWN.
in most cases it's only after about 6 months that the situation is stabilized and you know what you are left with.
in my case it took a loooooong agonizing time to get to where I am now, very low volume T. (Thank God)
but on the way
it was wild, I had more than one tone.. 2 and sometimes maybe even 3 and it got me out of control. and again, it took months to heal. by the way, most people who have 2 tones or more report they have a high whistling tone which is steady and fixed and another tone which is higher and it comes in bursts like a cricket.
so we are not talking about a little wound you got that will heal after a 3 weeks or a month. we are talking about months of recovery that in the meantime you think you are doomed with this forever and that might not be the case. so if I am not wrong, I think I got this number from a professor one time, about 20% of the patients heal by themselves.
it's important to stay positive and to hope and believe it will go away as it came and not to stress the body, many doctors say that keeping calm is the most important for the body to heal itself. never panic and remember there is always something to be done. I think that ignoring this fact leads to the panic and stress. you should always remember there is always something to be done. if I would've still gotten a bad T I was leaning towards neuromodulation, to fight the T sound with the same sound and the neuro' sounds, but there could be a fight! I believe there will be a solution that involves training the brain with sound.
I would recommend anybody with my scenario of SHL which is not a long way from onset (I used it up to 4 months after onset than started neuromodulation) to use a "sweep" sine tone that goes through all of the frequencies so it will stimulate and maybe revive the cells in the cochleas in the ears that might be dying but not completely dead.
The settings I recommend is something like 1KHz (or a little higher) to 20KHz in 20 seconds going up or up and back down (I don't think it matters) it sounds like a long lasting siren.
I heard that there were studies that shows that this worked on animals and even heard there was a study with humans but I didn't see it.
if you have a better ear, always be on the watch for the volume, don't put it to loud, monitor the loudness with your better ear from time to time. I played this sound only to the ear that needs it (left one, in most cases that is the "bad" ear)
again, watch out for high volume, you don't want to make more damage.
if you were exposed to a brief spike of sound it's probably ok since it was not for a long time.
use at your own risk.
you can use a PC program named "audacity" to generate a "chirp" which is the same thing and then generate a few seconds of silence and copy and paste to create many of the same and then when you have the length in time that you want. export the file to use on any device like phone, mp3 player etc'.
For android devices, the best app I found that lets you set the values for min and max and for how long and also shows you the frequency value which is great:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jm.android.frequencygenerator
For PC, a program that does the same. it's basically the same as the android app. it's a good tool but it doesn't show you the frequency value.
http://vb-audio.pagesperso-orange.fr/us/products/generator/generator.
I think that this stimulation has helped me a lot, but there is no definite way of telling. it just makes sense. the best "T" ENT doctor in my country was smiling to me about it, telling me I was smart doing it. if it was up to me I would recommend that to anyone who is 2-3 weeks from onset to start this stimulation in some way (but not right after onset since any sound/noise might do harm in that stage or interfere with healing, not sure).
you will find out as you run the sweep sound that:
1. There most likely be "drops" in volume as you go up that shows that you have losses in those frequencies and correspondingly in those parts in the cochlea. it's like a 20 second super fast hearing test.
you could have a drop and then as the frequency will go up the volume will return to be loud and then there could be more drops.
try to see if they are close to your T frequency, I will get into this issue in more detail in the near future when I'll talk about NM)
2. there will be a limit frequency to your hearing. which you will not hear above it. keep in mind that the bar can be raised if you'll turn the volume up when you are in these high frequencies. you can probably hear much more than what you think you can. but don't do it. just stay on a fixed reasonable volume to stimulate the cells.
I used to do it for periods of about 10 min on and then 10 min off for about 1 hour a few times a day.
It was my answer to T when it raised its head, sometimes I felt much better after that stimulation and I was rushing to do it when T pissed me off.
The truth is I wrote
A LOT about neuromodulation as well, what I think of it and many advises from my personal experience of how to use it right in my opinion but I chose not to post it right now so I could confirm that all of my data is updated. stay tuned. I'll post it in the do it yourself neuromodulation forum soon.