I'm not sure I understand what you mean by this. Do you mean blowing air into the ear canal from outside your ear, or blowing air from the inside through the Eustachian tubes?
Blowing air into your middle ear by closing your nose and slowly releasing air from your lungs into your auditory tubes increases the middle ear pressure.
I'm not sure if everyone knows they can do this since it would completely nullify the use of the ear clearing device on EngineerLA's post. I thought it was rather strange such a device existed.
No, it doesn't. Your experience of "fullness" could come from the eardrum being pushed out or pulled in, or something else, like the clogging or inflammation of the Eustachian tube itself. Fullness is a symptom, not a cause.
I agree, we have to pin down the sensory cause for this fullness. The question has been asked several times and as far as I can discern there are a few things than could cause fullness in the ear.
1. The tensor tympani contracting; this has happened to me before as a result of loud sounds and the feeling of fullness was exactly the same.
2. The cochlear round window membrane being pushed either in or out, this would be due to pressure difference in the middle ear; but like I mentioned I've checked this with my ENT, no pressure difference remained.
3. The endolymphatic fluid is pressure is regulated by an expansion container inside the cochlea called the endolymphatic sack, it is situated outside the bone.
4. inflammation or infection; I do not agree with these because the human body can not carry an infection for expended periods of time.
I am partial to an infection causing damage to the cochlear synapses when it enters the endolymphatic fluid, thereby causing enough damage to push the signal over the noise filtering of the nervous system leaving a patient with sudden loud audible tinnitus instead of a gradual onset. Any damage to the synapses would trigger the tensor tympani muscle to contract causing ear fullness.
Furthermore a sound can generally be felt inside the ear, I have come to think that maybe the production of that sound in my synaptic dendrites is what is activating type II afferents to cause the sensation that is similar to loud external sound.
This is very interesting to me. I've never heard of such a thing, and would like to know more. What exactly is the pressure gauge that your doctor is using? Where is it measuring the pressure? How does the pressure equalize-- I mean, what is the doctor doing that causes the pressure to equalize? Can you explain this in more detail please?
An ENT should have an earplug with a very sensitive pressure gauge and can check the pressure in your middle ear while you clear your ears and breathe. We used it to test if my ear fullness has a cause in pressure difference by creating over-pressure in the middle ear. It didn't, my middle ear is able to equalize pressure within .4 seconds through the auditory tubes.
I don't think that everyone has the feeling of fullness along with their tinnitus. Maybe those that have a full feeling have the cause as being a Eustachian tube blockage or inflammation, and those that don't have another cause.
This will be an excellent survey question.
All this aside, the important thing is to figure out why exactly coenzymatic B1 has been so helpful. I was simply wondering why you assumed auditory tube inflammation instead of cochlear inflammation since an inflammation in the cochlea will most certainly produce tinnitus, yet the same can not be said for the auditory tube.
I hope everyone else here will get back and report their results.
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