New Tinnitus Directory!

A new tinnitus based directory has been added to www.tameyourtinnitus.com where you can add your tinnitus or other health related site.

Just go to http;//tameyourtinnitus.com/directory/

Almost a third of British people would feel far less comfortable wearing a hearing aid than wearing glasses, concludes a recent survey from Siemens Hearing.

Over 80% of people said they would be comfortable wearing glasses.

“The majority of Brits seem to be stuck in a time warp when it comes to their perception of hearing,” says audiologist Rob Ryman at Siemens. “The fact that more than twice the number of people would feel happier wearing glasses than a hearing instrument demonstrates that people probably still think of hearing instruments as clunky, protruding, banana-shaped devices.”

“If this is the case, it’s hardly surprising that our hearing is relegated on our list of priorities,” he added, pointing to statistics which show that 81% of people have not had a hearing test, compared to just 10% that have never visited an optician.

With about 1 in 7 people suffering from hearing loss in the UK, and with so few people having hearing tests, many are not even aware of their impairment, especially if it is only moderate.

The stigma of using hearing aids is often based on the perception, that they are bulky, indiscreet and unfashionable, but Ryman argues that it wasn’t long ago that eye glasses were viewed in a similar way. “They haven’t always been the trendy, hi-design fashion accessory they have become today,” he says.

However, since the onset of tinnitus is often related to age related hearing loss the acceptability of hearing aids can mean the difference between suffering with hearing loss and tinnitus or possibly totally overcoming the problem with the technology available.

To counter the negative perception, Siemens Hearing has launched a new digital range of hearing aids that are both fashionable and discreet. Coming in smaller sizes and various colours, the new hearing aids can be matched to clothes and even be linked to MP3 players.

For more information, visit www.siemens.co.uk/hearing

Tinnitus Awareness Week

This week is Tinnitus Awareness Week in the United States in association with the American Tinnitus Association.

The week is based on the theme 'Moving the World Toward A Cure'.

The aim is to raise both money and awareness for tinnitus research with the aim of finding a cure.

http://www.ata.org/action_alliance/taw_start.php

The Forum Software Works

As before I turned my back on the tinnitus forum for five minutes and they were at it again.

Thankfully this forum software allows me to delete and modify the posts so as you can see the pornography related posts are deleted and the rest of the links are disabled and casual posting stopped.

What it does mean is that visitors will have to register if they want to post but that should at least ensure that the forum remains what it was intended for, a discussion vehicle for tinnitus related issues.

Registering is very simple and will put you under no obligation.

The Tinnitus Forum is Back

I have installed some new sofware at www.tameyourtinnitus.com to bring back the Tinnitus Forum where people with tinnitus can chat, exchange experiences or just let off steam about their tinnitus.

I am hoping this new software will make it easier to keep the scumbags and filth merchants from posting.

So please use it, it's there for you, and I will enjoy sharing it with you.

http://tameyourtinnitus.com/forum

Is RTMS the Cure?

A report out this week suggests that daily sessions of a treatment called Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation over the left temporoparietal cortex of the brain, may be a useful treatment for tinnitus, according to the results of a preliminary study published in the February issue of the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.

"Treatment of chronic tinnitus is difficult," Dr. Eman M. Khedr, of Assiut University Hospital in Egypt, and colleagues note. "Pharmacotherapy (antidepressants, benzodiazepines), cognitive therapies, or electronic devices that attempt to cancel the tinnitus have all been tried either separately or in combination but the success rate is not high."

"Recently, a number of promising reports have appeared, suggesting that repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) might be a possible treatment," the researchers explain.

To investigate the theory, they randomized 66 patients with varying levels of tinnitus to receive RTMS at 1 Hz, 10 Hz, 25 Hz or a sham (placebo) treatment, applied daily over the left temporoparietal cortex for 14 days and then once a month monthly for the next 4 months. The subjects included 39 men and 27 women with a mean age of 41 years.

Twenty-four patients had severe tinnitus, 26 had moderate tinnitus and 16 had mild tinnitus.

There were no significant differences between the treatment groups at baseline.

Compared with the sham (placebo) treatment, the investigators observed a noticable response in all three treatment groups.

A good response (more than 80%) was seen in 6 patients treated with 25 Hz, 5 patients treated with 10 Hz, and 1 patient who received 1 Hz. Partial response (21% to 80%) was seen in 6 patients in the 25 Hz group, 8 in the 10 Hz group, and 12 in the 1 Hz group. The remaining patients, around 24%, were considered non-responders.

The findings for the good and partial responders were significant, at p = 0.02 for the 25 Hz group and p = 0.006 for the 10 Hz group.

No significant differences were observed in the responses to different RTMS frequencies.

It was also founf that the patients who had tinnitus for the longest period of time were the least likely to respond to RTMS treatment.

Dr. Khedr's group reached the conclusion that "10 daily sessions of rTMS may be a safe and effective method of reducing symptoms of chronic tinnitus for several months."

Tinnitus is The Pits

As afflictions go , Tinnitus really is The Pits.

Its not even an affliction, it is only a 'symptom' of something else going on. Trouble is no-one as yet knows what.

Only you can hear it. In fact you may even be pretending it is there at all.

I personally went to my doctor and said " I think my head is about to explode" and her reaction was "Oh, you have a little bit of tinnitus do you"?

Dont get me wrong she is a great doctor. Just never had Tinnitus, and has no idea what it is like despite her medical training.

Same with friends and relatives.

"He has tinnitus you know". they say with about the same compassion as " He has a veruca", or you will have to forgive him, He has an ingrowing toenail".

The difference is you can show someone your veruca or ingrowing toenail, not that there is any real comparison, but you cant share your experience of the noises in your head, you can only try to explain.

Even so it is only on your say so. What is he on? I cant hear it.

He should see Freds broken leg. I could see where he had the stitches.

It could be threee months before he is back to normal. Poor Fred.

24/7/365 for eleven years I have had these noises in my head. Three months before back to normal?

I wish.

Tinnitus, Let's Not Forget

Our affliction is definitely a strange one, in more ways than one.

Ninety percent of tinnitus sufferers have Subjective Tinnitus, which means it can only be heard by the sufferer.

By virtue of the definition, NO-ONE else can hear it.

Consequently no-one else has the faintest idea how bad YOUR particular brand of tinnitus is or how badly it affects you or disrupts your life.

So the better you appear to cope, regardless of how badly you actually feel, the less your friends, relatives or work colleagues assume you are bothered by it.

The better you become at hiding the fact that you feel your head will explode at any moment, the more the people around you will assume you have everything under control.

In fact after a while, even people close to us may say, “You had not mentioned your tinnitus recently, I assumed it had gone”.

The fact that you are like the proverbial Swan on the lake, appearing to glide gracefully across the water when in fact you are paddling like fury underneath the surface, will even lead people to completely forget that you have anything wrong at all.

Which is great. Or is it?

I have had a couple of instances recently where people close to me seem to have forgotten that, at times, I can and do struggle to concentrate because of my tinnitus.

Very occasionally it is so bad that I have difficulty in stringing a sentence together or putting one foot in front of the other. But I cope and get on with it.

The difficulty is, when people forget, because of your coping skills, they do not make allowances for the occasional lapse as they would with a person where they could permanently be aware of their problem.

No-one with a modicum of decency would tell a man with a club foot or wooden leg who had just tripped to “Pick your Feet up!”, or a blind person who had walked into a lamp post to “Watch where you are going”!, but we are not afforded the same degree of compassion.

I am working on an audio programme that may actually give the people close to me, and others, an idea of what is going on in my head.

While generating some particularly irritating, and actually quite accurate, sounds on my computer, my daughter shouted out “Dad do you have to do that it is really annoying”?

So what do say to that? “ Well, yes I know dear, it is annoying, I have heard it twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year for the last eleven years. I am fully aware that it is not nice”.

Of Course I Have no Friends, I have Tinnitus.

Am I saying you can have friends but not if you have tinnitus?

Not really but what I am saying is that it can be more difficult to have friends if you do have tinnitus.

The thing with tinnitus is that it is, mostly, subjective.

This means that it is only heard by the sufferer.

This in turn means that the ringing and noises in your head, that you mention to your friends occasionally, cannot be heard by your friends.

They cannot have the faintest idea what it is like or how it affects you. Hell, you may even be making it up to gain a bit of sympathy.

After all, what is this Tinnitus anyway? Its only a bit of ringing in the ears. What is the fuss?

So there we have it. What your friends REALLY think of your tinnitus. They dont know and lets face it they don’t really care. They cant see it, they cant feel it and they cant hear it, so it cant really be that bad.

When you are invited out and you are having a really bad time with your tinnitus and decline the offer, it is usually put into the same category as “I am washing my hair”.

In other words they think you cant be bothered.

When they are endlessly going on about their problems, as usual, and you are having problems of your own and are a bit short with them, they think your being rude. After all he/she ALWAYS listens to all my problems.

Consequently the friends you do make don’t seem to stay around that long. They need positive, bouncy people to enhance their own dreary lives, and unfortunately you aint it.

The ones that do hang around are either Saints or are pretty sad individuals themselves. Unfortunately I have not met many saints. At least you have a reason!

Also people with BAD tinnitus can tend to be a bit insular. After all it is difficult enough getting through the day without having to interact with other people.

So if you are having a party and want me to bring my friends, don’t hold your breath, they are a bit thin on the ground at the moment.

In the realms of tinnitus sufferers, I don’t think I am on my own.

1176 Sign UK Tinnitus Petition

I just became the 1176th person to sign a petition to the British Government to release funds for tinnitus research in order to find a cure for tinnitus.

While the worlds governments seem quite happy to fund monuments or statues to people we have never heard of or some obscure arts fund, those of us who suffer in silence with the ringing in our ears or whatever, get passed over time and time again.

It is time we made ourselves heard and now is the time to do it.

If you are a UK citizen and have tinnitus, or know someone who has and how devastating it can be to those who do have it, please go to the link below and sign up.

The deadline is 17th March 2008 so DO IT NOW!

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/tinnitus-funding/

Tinnitus Is Just a Word

To 99% of the worlds population tinnitus is just a word,

Out of this huge percentage, half will not even know what tinnitus is, most of the other half thinking it is a mild annoyance suffered by a few whiners who make a big deal of it.

We 1% know differently. Granted there are a few who get the odd whistle or ring in their ears occasionally when they are doing something particularly strenuous and tell the world that they are tinnitus sufferers, but the rest of us who live with this dreadful thing 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year tend to suffer in silence and do not want to burden others with our problem.

The other thing is that tinnitus is extremely subjective. That is two people may have exactly the same symptoms (unlikely, but bear with me) and one sees the noises in their head as a mild annoyance while the other is practically suicidal.

People who have no idea, and say “Oh yes, I get that sometimes, isn’t it awful” when you mention your tinnitus are little comfort and frankly are best avoided.

There are however a lot of people, who you may not even suspect, who are genuine tinnitus sufferers and may never have mentioned it had you not confided in them first.

However the people you most need to understand, your loved ones, your doctor, your work supervisors, genuinely do NOT generally understand, and it is not their fault. How can they possibly fully understand something that is unique to you? They can only imagine.

So when you say to someone “I have tinnitus” and they reply “Have you dear? That”s nice”, don’t be surprised or annoyed, they are not being unfeeling or patronising. They really do not have a clue what it means to you.

Tinnitus to them is just a word.

Tinnitus treatment.

Every day I read articles or reports about tinnitus treatment and occasionally tinnitus ‘miracle cures’.

You know the sort of thing “I took orange juice mixed with elephant dung and my tinnitus disappeared overnight”.

Of course you have to pay through the nose to ‘learn’ the magic formula.

Seriously though since many incidents of tinnitus disappear as quickly and suddenly as they appeared, any one of hundreds of things could be linked to a cure.

Imagine, “I had a cup of cocoa before I went to bed, and when I woke up my tinnitus was gone!”

I am sure there are people out there who actually believe these things.

However, if you read between the lines of actual treatments being offered to tinnitus sufferers by the medical profession and other practitioners, you will see that, since there is no known cure for most forms of subjective (only heard by the sufferer) tinnitus, the treatment is aimed at the PERSON and not the tinnitus itself.

The final words uttered to most chronic tinnitus sufferers are “You will have to learn to live with it”, and so the treatment is aimed at helping the sufferer come to terms with the condition rather than trying to make the tinnitus ‘go away’.

All the tests etc that are conducted from the time you first see your doctor with ‘Ringing in the ears’ to the time you are told the ‘live with it’ bad news, are to rule out the rare medical conditions that in most cases CAN be treated.

The treatment offered afterwards is directed at YOU, not at your tinnitus.

We have to remember that, despite the vast discoveries by medical science in recent years, very little is really known about tinnitus. There are numerous theories but little new has been discovered.

Most research and in turn most discoveries have been made in the fields of the ‘killer diseases’ (and rightly so in my opinion despite my chronic tinnitus), and since tinnitus doesn’t kill you, the money and resources have been directed elsewhere.

If you are a tinnitus sufferer and are out there looking for the ‘miracle cure’, (we’ve all done it), just remember that you may, for the time being, be better off spending your money on something tangible that helps YOU rather than chasing what may be The Impossible Dream.

http://www.tameyourtinnitus.com