Being cautious is a good approach to this, and also trying to gather as much information about hyperacusis as you can.
I am already a lost case, since I am losing my hearing, maybe I risked it too much.
I can only hope that other people have a better outcome and can improve from hyperacusis and maybe find some therapy, drug or surgery that works for them.
I am not too sure that symptoms from hyperacusis can be cathegorised so easily in closed compartments. Sometimes one experiences thumps, and movements of muscles that are purely mechanical, but if the cause of hyperacusis is loud noise maybe there is some deeper damage to haircells, brain processing or sound or the hearing nerve.
Also, with a very small sample of patients and on top of that few information about them, the origin of their hyperacusis etc is it very hard to get a conclusion or be sure about what to do or which path to follow.
Lately I am asking people about this, so I would like to ask you too, since it's been a while without chatting on these fórums: which changes have you noticed in your hearing over the long run? How are your audiometric tests? Did hyperacusis get better?
There's never been a visible loss of hearing on audiometry, but audiometry tests are lame anyways and don't hit the exact frequencies of my two tinnituses. However, the idea that hearing loss and hyperacusis are linked is probably just a myth Jastreboff concocted together with magical thinking.
I've noticed a slight worsening over the years. And most probably a slight intensifying of my vibratory tinnitus, which I feel somewhat more intensely than 1 or 2 years ago. This I think could be because I put the fan with which I cover uneven external sounds with, on more often. Or it could be lack of physical exercise, or more possibly, letting myself go and eating chocolate ice creams and biscuits when that's not very wise as one of the possibilities of the ear injury is that it's somewhere where chocolate makes it worsens, after all vibratory tinnitus has strong links to hydrops without vertigo but no research about it of course.
Loud noise has caused all sorts of symptoms, but if anyone bothered to research it and not just collect TINNET EU grants and academic citations and act like a creep who's ''studied under Jastreboff'', the first thing they'd do is separate symptoms into parts. My symptoms are a minority, I'd say a majority involve pain, I'd even say most don't feel movement in their ears and they only feel pain, and that most have it way harder than me when an ambulance surprises them on the street and they have to put up with neuropathic pain for a few months after that, but that they also have it way easier than me in that they can sit in an apartment and not be bothered by the slightest vibrations of cars or people's footsteps around the building, or birds chirping etc. And they don't have to sit around covering up these uneven sounds with a box fan with a shirt on top, only to be told by some inbred lady that it's all just in ''the limbic system''. Btw, most of Jastreboff's followers are women for the same reason why they fill up other shit professions like psychology, teaching, journalism and politics.
The gold standard of otolaryngology is to not pay attention to an issue if there's no perceptible hearing loss, so when that gold standard is lost, the issue gets downgraded to the shitty practitioners that lack feelings of guilt. When they ship the patients off to shrinks, or hypnotists, or TRT preachers, you just know the study results will be cleaned up through layers and layers of cosmetics.
Separating me and Sim Roesems from pain H folks would be a great first step, but the years pass on and these fuckshits in the profession just don't budge, and everything points to the possibility that they're just getting worse at this than better. Whether it's inner ear issue, or neurological issue, or something misadjusted in the middle ear, that's just speculation that older papers were better at than newer ones. New doctors are cowards, for similar reasons why it was the fact that Silverstein was 80 year old that he considered the possibility that a stapes was to blame for at least a certain type of H. For the same reason why when Sismanis retired no one followed, least of all in Greece where rampant poverty takes doctors to take the safest route, and not much in USA either, where because of lack of interest no one sat down to figure out whether he'd been curing myoclonus or hyperacusis (I think he was mostly curing the former, but others have told me it was also the latter).
Sim claimed he got his symptoms from a cyst in the eustachian tube and/or (I can't remember which) the subsequent operation to remove it.
"1) Stiff (also full) sensation in the right ear;
2) Pressure difference (left ear versus right ear);
3) Increasing pressure when driving, eating and listening to music somewhat louder than average (especially right);
4) Acoustic shock with sudden, unexpected, saturated sound (the shock lasts a fraction of a second and feels like an electrocution in the ear, for example when radio pops on);
5) Hypersensitive to short, specific sounds (especially ' clicking ' sounds such as typing on a keyboard and opening a sodacan). I not only hear these sounds, I can also really feel these sounds. This symptom is disabled by saturation with ambient noise;
6) When I manipulate the Tensor Veli, a loud ' clicking ' noise is generated in the right ear, clearly audible by third parties;
7) Unusually loud ' plopping ' sound, every time I swallow (feels and sounds like when you're in a plane and try to clear the ears);
8) Spontaneous, daily pain in and behind the ears (sometimes up to the jaws);
9) Migraine;
10) When swallowing or yawning, increasing pressure feels like pushing the eardrum (or something else in the ear) outwards;
11) Buzzing (humming) sound, like an engine, inside the ear as a reaction on soft and hard touch of certain zones in the face (closed eye, earshell, neck) or even at slight touch of facial hair;
12) Numb feeling inside the ear (on gentle touch of the right earshell);
13) Short, low tone feedback in response to certain internal body sounds such as swallowing and suction of saliva. Feedback like you tap a microphone which generates reverb in an empty room. Sometimes I experience that reverb as painful;
14) Distorted own voice, usually when I talk louder (humming sound, in sync with own voice, as running throug a defect speaker);
15) Louder sounding of some sounds inside the mouth or other body sounds. I hear my footsteps, heart beat and chewing of crackling food abnormally loud (when eating this sometimes causes a thundering sound);
16) Humming sound accompanied by feeling of spasms in the right ear when other persons speak. It feels like there's a bug inside the ear (especially at high pitched voice and female voices - also depends on the acoustics in the space where we are);
17) Spasms (not related to sound) in the ear not only palpable, but also audible. They make a ' wobbling ' sound (only at night and in the morniing when I'm laying in bed);
18) Pulsityle Tinnitus on the heart beat (sounds a bit like the heart rate of a baby when performing an echography on a pregnant woman). I can also feel the heart beat on the eardrum''
And in just that Facebook post he was more thorough than all the shitty official literature that reported interventions in the middle ear. And if it weren't for paradigm shifters like Silverstein or Roesems we'd just be sitting ducks still with Jastreboff shitting down our mouths getting his fanboi Rob from chat-hyperacusis to censor and preach that ''the ear is just a vessel''.
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