ATA Funds $10,000 Research Causes of Tinnitus

$10,000 is peanuts. It's pathetic.

If Bill Gates got tinnitus, then we'd see some real money thrown at figuring a way to fix this condition.

I have read that there are many Iraq war veterans who are coming home with tinnitus. There is increasing pressure on our ineffective Congress to fund tinnitus research.

 

Marku -

You're probably right, that it's about the PhD candidate, not the money. I was "pretty quick on the draw" writing that comment, skimming the write-up.

I would like to see more research money thrown at bio-physicists instead of audiologists. In my opinion, we need less research of the medical variety (for example, studies about magnessium and anti-depressants, involving questionares).

Again, in my opinion, this problem will require some very smart individuals, with the combined talents of medical education and engineering talent, who can look at the human body as a machine. I think that tinnitus can be solved if they use things like MEG/MRI scans, and neurological mapping of the nerve circuitry. That type of thinking seems to be beyond the approaches typically used by audiologists and ENT doctors. There are some extremely smart people out there who I believe can solve this. It's a matter of finding these people and using them.

As a side note: I was reading one of your earlier interesting blogs was about lidocaine. Apparently lidocaine injections will stop tinnitus in the short term. Whatever happened to that type of research? Was it dropped?

 

Lidocaine is very, very bad for your heart so it cannot really be used long-term. Looks like there's no way around that.

 

Karl,

There are already good neuroscientists like Aage Moller, Berthold Lannguth, Dirk De Ridder and many others who study tinnitus trough neuroimaging and qualitative measures. Look at the phenomenal work of the tinnitus research initiative. I agree with your opinion about the hard sciences. More and more people with an engineering and physics formation study biological systems and that is a good thing.

And yes, ENT's and audiologists understand jack about tinnitus.

 

Fish -
What I mean to say is, lidocaine works, somehow. If they could figure out what it's doing, then there may be another way to do the same thing without using lidocaine.

daedalus -
I'm glad to hear about these neuroscientists. There can sometimes be a big difference in research approaches being done in different countries. The different styles of research we are seeing today is somewhat like in the early 1900's when men were trying to build flying machines. There were a lot of ideas about how to fly: Some people built silly bird-shaped contraptions; finally, the Wright brothers got it right. During that discovery period, it was a level playing field between the contestants, until a working flying machine succeeded.

There is always the danger in a "discovery phase" of being "too democratic", with all ideas being treated equally - ineffectively spending money on every type of research, instead of focusing on what counts. It's a gamble predicting "what counts". This is why organizations like the ATA need very astute decision makers ( but do they have the right people? Reminds me of how the French lost 50,000 men trying to build the Panama Canal, because they used the wrong approach.) There may be only one way to fix tinnitus, but we don't know yet. It is important that the right ideas don't get lost in the bureucracy of professional organizations that may tend to treat all research equally.

I sort of know what is happening in the U.S. I'm most impressed with the MEG/MRI imaging done at West Texas A&M. That imaging was developed using money from Ford, I believe. That same scan is currently also being tested at Harvard. Perhaps things are on a roll. But if someone rich and powerful enough said, "Let's do it this year", we'd probably see faster progress.

 

That rich person is called Matteo de Nora and founded the Tinnitus Research Initiative. They are doing good work.

http://www.tinnitusresearch.org/

 

daedalus -
I went to the website you posted and downloaded a document by A.E. Moller. Will read it tomorrow. But what little I read I liked. I assume he's Scandanavian, so I'm impressed (because of my own ancestry). He qoutes Anne Frank, in the context of setting out to find a cure:“Life is like a game of chess; the first moves are very important, but until the game is over you still have some good moves to play".
Of course, let's hope that these researchers aren't giving awards to themselves before they've gotten some real results. This past weekend was a bad one for my "T". I need a fix, soon.