The number of replies is getting out of hand so I've concatenated
all of them for my response here.
Dirk Bruere at Neopax said:
Can sound at about the same frequency cause interference effects?
Not for anybody I've talked to. And noise cancelling headsets don't
do it either, they can actually make it seem worse. But, as I wrote
in an earlier posting, there have been published studies where they
HAMMER someone with a doze of noise. Some folks will then report
that the tinnitus seems do be diminished, sometimes significantly,
but often only for a few seconds or a few minutes. But that isn't
too surprising considering the sort of AGC involved in the hearing
system.
John Woodgate said:
Nope, hadn't seen that before. But I see at the bottom part of
what they are suggesting is the "retraining therapy." Over in
alt.support.tinnitus, that I used hang out until the bickering and
lack of any progress got to be more than it was worth, they have
knock down drag out fights over the guy with his retraining therapy.
I'd dearly like to see a carefully controlled research study to
settle whether that really does anything or not. But more or less,
I've made my peace with my case.
John Woodgate said:
Yes, in my limited experience. I have mild, intermittent 'tonal'
tinnitus, hardly any more than normal 'ringing ears', except that it
often persists for several hours.
I'm a little surprised it works. Others find that any sort of
background noise can distract people from noticing low levels of
tinnitus and that the often much higher levels of noise generated
by the "maskers" that are prescribed for people who really want
something to work, those can do some to distract you, but it is
commonly a real struggle to put up with those and thus far they are
close enough to what triggers it for me that they make it substantially
worse for me.
Dirk Bruere at Neopax said:
And how frequency stable is the tinnitus?
It is a mixed bag. There are a tiny number of people with a really
odd case where you can stand next to them and listen very carefully
and YOU can hear their noise. But for almost all others that isn't
the case. There are some where it is almost constant in amplitude
and frequency. Many folks have some degree of spreading and don't
have a pure tone. And some have the amplitude go up and down at
least some over time. Mine's sort of a high pitched whistle with
some high frequency white noise riding over the top. Imagine that
a little below the volume of your phone ringing or alarm clock going
off. Then realize it won't every stop. Shoots hell out of ever
really concentrating again.
Rich Grise said:
Thanks for the feedback. It would have been cool if it had "worked,"
but science is, after all, science. So my hypothesis has encountered
its first counterexample in the first actual experiment - I guess
I won't go around trying to tout my new "cure"!
You can read the literature. You can compare your ideas to the TRT
(tinnitus retraining therapy) and see how close they are. You might
even come up with a new theory that could be tested. And, in the
new millenium, there is nothing to stop you from touting, or selling,
your new "cure", even if it doesn't work. But I don't recommend it.
You are welcome, happy to help, maybe you will stumble onto something.
Dave VanHorn said:
In my case, it's not so much a tone, as narrow white noise, around a
frequency.
It might be changing, but not that I notice.
Dirk Bruere at Neopax said:
Blood in veins/capilliaries? Can you hear the heartbeat?
BTW, is it possible to check whether a noise really exists or whether it's
'internal'?
As I mentioned above, a rare few literally have the ears generating
the noise and you can hear it if you listen to them carefully. But
for almost everyone else it is entirely internal, with the nerves
passing something back to the brain that makes us believe that the
damn alarm just never shuts off. There are a few where it is blood
pressure related. And there are a handful of other special cases.
But these are usually the first things they check when going through
a screening process when a new patient walks in the door at one of
the few clinics that have experience with tinnitus.
To wrap this up, I remember when the probe arrived at Jupiter a few
years ago. After a few hours of news the reporters were clearly
running out of anything to say. One who was grasping at straws
asked one of the mission engineers "if you could have gone with the
probe, would you have gone?" Both the reporter and engineer almost
certainly thought this was the dumbest question anyone could ever
ask, but for completely different reasons. Without blinking an eye
the engineer said "absolutely!" The reporter was clearly surprised
and had to think for a minute. Then he realized, "the probe isn't
coming back, so you wouldn't really have said yes, would you?" The
engineer could not imagine anyone who would pass up the opportunity
to likely be the only person who will ever get to see Jupiter close
up. He said he would go in a second. The reporter couldn't imagine
thinking this and that was the end of that.
Relating this to tinnitus, the hearing system is a convoluted system
with lots of built in feedback and AGC. My theory is it is the AGC
component of the system failing that is the mechanism for most of
the tinnitus out there. That seems to match much of the published
physiology and neurology. But we have very little "live data" on
this, especially in the case of tinnitus. What little we have is
indirect and open to wide interpretation. What engineer can have
a theory about the AGC of a system being broken and the cause of
the problem, have the signals just a fraction of an inch away from
your probes, have small risk in drilling a hole and getting the
probes in there to confirm or refute the theory, and not want to
just get the probes in there for an hour or two to see if you are
right?
It won't be trivial or even easy, the "traces" are damn tiny, we
don't have a very good schematic, and the factory service manual
was never provided, but hey, that is business as usual. And we are
a fraction of an inch away from the signals we need to see, far
easier to get there than to get to Jupiter. If I'm right then a
mechanism will be supported and that is the first step to figuring
out a fix.
thanks
