On Tinnitus Emergency Treatment

[MountainCreek]

Suppose you break your leg, you go to the hospital and the doctor says to you: so you feel a bit pain in your leg now? But I assure you that if you try to not think on this pain, but instead focus on the positive things in your life, then you will after a while no longer notice the pain in your leg.

As you trust the doctor, you follow his/hers advice, but the pain never goes away, and you can never walk properly again. But as you doctor urges you to try and walk nevertheless, you do walk. But in fact things do not get better by that. Instead the legs starts to break even more, and the pain gets even worse.

Now this does not happen with broken legs because doctors know exactly how to treat a broken leg. It is a routine to them. The also know exactly how long the bandage needs to stay on your leg so that it is completely healed and safe to remove again.

Suppose you get sound-induced tinnitus one day. It should according to my opinion be treated just like the same emergency situation as when you break a leg. One should be able to call the ambulance (but a silent one) and rapidly be transported in a silent manner to a silent chamber in the hospital where one gets food inside the silent chamber and lives completely isolated. Doctors should know how long is enough to remain there, based on the story behind the tinnitus and possible after taking an audiogram. My estimate based on my own experiences, is that if this is done right away after the tinnitus onset, then two weeks is enough to completely cure any sound induced tinnitus. A delayed transportation to the silent chamber significantly delays the healing (at present moment I am up to two months treatment with silence since I missed the onset of my tinnitus this time) and so does any escapes from the silent chamber out in a noise environment (such as a city with lots of cars).

Economic loss for our society? I would not think so. Completely curing people from tinnitus would most likely be very benefical to any economy in the long run.

 

[Bobby B]

Yes and no
Total absence of sound is actually bad for hair cell recovery right after acoustic trauma

There is a study on mouse where they did that experiment

I remember reading that study but cannot find the link

The goal is to expose you ears to some sound in order to stimulate hair cells recovery but under 60db so there is a fine line here

Under 60 means wearing ear protection in
Most public venues and transportation as a noisy restaurant / street can be up to 85db

 

[MountainCreek]

OK, thanks a lot. I would like to know more along these lines. It could make sense. My idea is that walking in a rather quite nature outdoors once in a while could be good to be on the safe side. I am also not so sure about complete silence indoors, especially if it is over a longer period of time. It might be sort of unnatural.

 

[MountainCreek]

Another thought I got. Hyperacusis tells us that we don't like to hear loud sound which in fact doesn't even need to very much louder than the sound of our shower.

I guess nobody would think that a pain from a bruise that we got by someone hitting us somewhere on our body, would get worse if we leave it and do not touch it. Even if the pain would remain for a long time, nobody would go and tell us to touch the bruice just a little bit, to get used to touches of the bruise.

How come that people tell us that we shall not stay in silence too much, and that if we do, then hyperacusis may get worse? We got hyperacusis by sound waves hitting our ear. Shall we then allow small sounds to *get used* to it? Would that be the right way to treat hyperacusis?

I find that hard to believe. It sounds more like a psychiatry than real science to me. Of course some people may argue that tinnitus is just a psychological thing. I would think that tinnitus is no more psychological than a bruise though.

 

[linearb]

Two weeks inside of a sound proof chamber immediately after onset will cure tinnitus? You'd better inform the medical establishment of your radical find; they will be fascinated.

 

[Sailboardman]

Put me in a sound proof room with my tinnitus! No worries! But don't forget to leave a 9mm Glock in there too! My two week stay, would be reduced to about 2 minutes. Next...

 

[GregCA]

How come that people tell us that we shall not stay in silence too much, and that if we do, then hyperacusis may get worse? We got hyperacusis by sound waves hitting our ear. Shall we then allow small sounds to *get used* to it? Would that be the right way to treat hyperacusis?

How do you know we get hyperacusis by sound waves hitting our ear? I'm pretty sure mine isn't from that.

One theory behind H is that if you overprotect your hearing, you don't train your brain to "lower its gain", so it keeps being hypersensitive (since it is deprived of input). Feeding your brain with sounds may trigger a natural lowering of the gain, which in turn should reduce hypersensitivity to sounds.

My H does not involve loud sounds: I can have a loud noise like a metal pan dropped on the floor in front of me and be ok, but if you softly crumple some paper/plastic bag 10 ft away from me, I feel the "noise saturation pain".

 

[MountainCreek]

How do you know we get hyperacusis by sound waves hitting our ear? I'm pretty sure mine isn't from that.

One theory behind H is that if you overprotect your hearing, you don't train your brain to "lower its gain", so it keeps being hypersensitive (since it is deprived of input). Feeding your brain with sounds may trigger a natural lowering of the gain, which in turn should reduce hypersensitivity to sounds.

My H does not involve loud sounds: I can have a loud noise like a metal pan dropped on the floor in front of me and be ok, but if you softly crumple some paper/plastic bag 10 ft away from me, I feel the "noise saturation pain".

Suppose a person needs glasses to see properly. Suppose this person got skin cancer on his right hand. It is a black ugly spot through the glasses. Since it looks so bad through the glasses, the person takes off the glasses, and all of a sudden it looks much better to him. The person can smile and say to himself, so simple it was to improve the skin cancer! But isn't this a lie? I guess everybody would agree that this is a lie. Now why would hyperacusis be any different? If the brain turns up the volume in silence, does that mean hyperacusis actually gets worse? I find that hard to believe. It appears to get worse. That is a different thing althogether.

 

[GregCA]

Suppose a person needs glasses to see properly. Suppose this person got skin cancer on his right hand. It is a black ugly spot through the glasses. Since it looks so bad through the glasses, the person takes off the glasses, and all of a sudden it looks much better to him. The person can smile and say to himself, so simple it was to improve the skin cancer!

In H, the lack of stimulus is what makes the brain turn up the gain (well that's one theory). If you want to draw a parallel with your glasses example, you have to build a scenario where someone gets hypersensitive to sunlight. Then this person puts super-dark sunglasses, so it doesn't hurt, but then the brain doesn't learn to take brightness anymore, so anytime that person takes out the sunglasses it will hurt his/her eyes (so it will always hurt his/her eyes).

I don't understand the skin cancer + glasses example being any similar to that, since the skin cancer is a symptom that you are just seeing differently through the glasses. Whether you look through the glasses or not doesn't involve any physiological change in the body with regards to the cancer. It does in the H theory.

 

[MountainCreek]

In H, the lack of stimulus is what makes the brain turn up the gain (well that's one theory). If you want to draw a parallel with your glasses example, you have to build a scenario where someone gets hypersensitive to sunlight. Then this person puts super-dark sunglasses, so it doesn't hurt, but then the brain doesn't learn to take brightness anymore, so anytime that person takes out the sunglasses it will hurt his/her eyes (so it will always hurt his/her eyes).

The eye gets sunburned just like any other piece of skin our body gets subburned. Sunburn helps us protect ourselves from harmful radiation. It is good to not always cover the eyes with sunglasses, and only use sunglasses when the sun is strong.

The eye pupil shrinks when we go from dark place to sunny place. This happens in less than one minute regardless we stayed in the dark place for two minutes or two years.

The question now is which of these two properties of the eye does describe hyperacusis in the best way? Can we *get used to* noise by being in noisy environment much the same way the eye can get sunburned and thereby get used to sunny places? Or do we adapt to noisy places in less than a minute much the same way that the eye pupil shrinks in a minute, no matter we stay in silence for two minutes or two years?

I thought hyperacusis belonged to the latter property of the eye pupil. But I can be wrong.