Wow, a lot of hostility suddenly on this thread!
It's a shame as this is normally a really nice place, not like many of those other internet forums on tinnitus which I stay away from.
I went to Dr Wilden's clinic for ten days treatment in September and received one of his home laser units about three weeks ago. I used it for the first week and then went on holiday and forgot to take it and so have not been able to use it for two weeks until today.
I can't offer any 'miracle cure' story but since taking the therapy I can say that the dull pains and 'fullness' I would sometimes get in my ears now seem to have stopped, the pressure problems I had (probably coming from a barotrauma I think I incurred from taking HBOT in April) are much reduced and my hyperacausis seems to also be improving. In general my ears seem much more 'comfortable' now. Of course I can't be sure if the treatment is the cause of these improvements or not but I suspect that they are related.
My tinnitus seems to be possibly a bit softer than before, but that is a perception thing and difficult to quantify. I haven't had an audiogram recently. The one I took a couple of weeks after the treatment showed what might be a slight improvement in the lower frequencies of both ears up to 1KHz (which are indeed the ones that are supposed to be impacted first in any recovery with the higher frequencies improving later), but the changes were all of the 5db level which is not statistically significant so I will leave it for a few months and then take an audiogram again at the same audiologist. The treatment often takes a long time to work - we are talking months or years here - so positive results will come slowly, if they come at all.
I'm not bothered that Dr Wilden isn't an ENT as my experience with ENT's so far has been less than satisfactory and they seem currently to have little to offer (and surprisingly little
interest in having something to offer) to people suffering from our condition. The fact that he is a genuine doctor with medical qualifications gives me some confidence and the general principle in the underlying theory that laser light stimulates the cell's mitochondira does seem to have value in certain regions of the body, and at least offers some form of 'scientific explanation' of how the process
might be working in the ears, though as an Engineering graduate I cannot comment upon or debate on the specifics of it (didn't somebody win the Nobel Prize a few years ago for working out how the mitochondria electron transport chain functions?). New/different techniques are often not accepted by the mainstream (eg. the HBOT university hospital doctors I met were very frustrated that they received so few patients for the skin bacterial infections which they told me HBOT has been proven to cure) as doctors can be notoriously conservative and powerful business interests like to maintain the 'status quo' as far as many treatments are concerned until they have the opportunity and infrastructure in place to make money directly from them. My own GP's attitude was that it could work (or not) so if I was prepared to pay for it then I might as well give it a try.
We have audiograms from 'attheedgeofscience' posting on this forum, I've seen audiograms from Hansi Cross and also other people in Docter Wilden's clinic which have shown improvements in hearing that correspond with the period of treatment (though not me yet!). So it seems from this that
some people seem to have responded positively to the treatment and frankly, at the current time LLLT (apart from a few vitamin supplements) seems to be about all that we have in the medical area (not talking about sound therapies here) until a few of these medical drugs in trials become approved and generally available
.
I've met Dr Wilden and don't believe him to be primarily money motivated: that was my personal feeling but objectively he could probably earn more working as a normal family doctor than he does from his laser practice with much less grief (he receives a lot of negative publicity and attacks within the medical profession), and he did no 'hard' or 'soft' sell on me concerning purchasing his treatment or his laser products (and indeed he recommended I wait before deciding to buy a home laser). I'm also sure from talking to him that he genuinely believes that his treatment works - and this should be self-evident as why else would a Doctor in Germany carry on for doing it for so long otherwise in the face of such general hostility?
Member
Member
