Door Slammed Near Ear, Scared of Damage

I was in a shopping mall bathroom when the big door slammed about a 1/3 of a meter behind me, it was so loud due to the small size of the room that to me it sounded like a shotgun going of next to my head. Quite frankly, I'm freaking out, it's by far the loudest sudden loud noise I've ever heard. I immediately had difficulty hearing and still do, almost 6 hours later.

Should I be on steroids? How do I communicate this to a doctor?

All advice is greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

 

if you feel your hearing has been impacted I would suggest calling an ENT asap

 

I think you should.

 

Did you recover after being exposed to the fire alarm and ambulance siren?

 

How do you suggest I put this to a doctor who is likely to say "wait and see what happens"?

Yes, thank you for asking.

 

To answer your question, check out my post in
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/tinnitus-onset.21357/#post-247103

If you recovered in the past, chances are you will get better this time too. Keep this in mind, in case your doctor is difficult and turns down your request..

 

@Zander93

Very unlikely that your going to have a problem with this try, and stay positive and busy. It was only for a second.

Hang in there


Louie

Quietatnight

 

My T is three months old, and it is a result of an acoustic trauma. The noise that caused my acoustic trauma lasted for a fraction of a second...

 

@Zander93 you're almost certainly fine, and there's really no good evidence to suggest that steroids are helpful for this kind of acoustic trauma. On the other hand, there's a lot of evidence that they can be pretty dangerous. If you're concerned, see a doctor, but I'd be pretty shocked if someone wanted to give you a steroid script for this.

For what it's worth over the years I've had a decent number of random loud noise exposures which have caused threshold shifts -- obviously, one should avoid such things as much as possible, but I do not believe that any of them have so far made any difference at all in my tinnitus (or my hearing, which is the same up to 16 kHZ as it was a decade ago, shockingly).

 

@Bill Bauer SSHNL (from your link) is a completely different problem than acoustic trauma; there is some evidence supporting steroids in that case, and it's the only reason my old ENT ever used them -- but SSNHL is thought to be pathological in origin, it's causing ear damage through a different mechanism which is directly interacting with the immune system.

 

That's what I thought when I didn't try to get my ENT to prescribe the rest of the course of prednisone for me. However, later on, I learned that steroids can be used regardless of the origin of T (see the third comment on:
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/thread...dexamethasone-others-oral-and-injections.348/

Also, check out
http://advancedotology.org/sayilar/84/buyuk/4-Comparison of Long-Term Outcome.pdf

 

People can do whatever they want, but I remain deeply skeptical. The first link is an anecdotal report of something one doctor may have said in Germany, and the second is talking about transtympanic injection of a different drug which can't really be compared to oral dosing. Also, transtympanic dosing has been tried over and over for decades, and does not have a lot of documented good outcomes behind it. All of these drugs are very old and relatively common, and I think it's unlikely that there's some magic benefit that's somehow missing from the decent size stash of data we've got.

I have researched this as extensively as possible out of boredom a couple times, read every relevant abstract on pubmed, and even chased down the fulltext PDFs of a few papers that looked interesting. Based on that I'm convinced that there is no demonstrated utility in humans taking oral steroids after acoustic trauma. IIRC, there were a few studies with relatively small sample sizes which showed a small positive benefit, and a couple other papers which showed none. Based on that, if steroids were entirely benign, then sure, why not, crapshoot but who cares -- but in fact they're relatively strong drugs, prone to create pretty extreme mood swings in a good number of people, and in rare cases have much more severe and long term side effects (http://www.mdedge.com/currentpsychi...costeroid-induced-mania-prepare-unpredictable, http://www.the-rheumatologist.org/article/when-steroids-cause-psychosis/, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1440-1819.2011.02260.x/full, https://www.hindawi.com/journals/crim/2011/564521/)

Actual psychotic breaks, let alone homicide, appear to be rare, but ~1/5th of people end up with some kind of psychiatric side effects -- and given the little we know about the possible implications of extra stress and anxiety during tinnitus onset, this seems pretty dubious to me.

I am passionate on this issue only because prednisone gets tossed around on here like it's some kind of standard treatment for noise trauma, and it's not, and the reason that it's not is a lack of efficiency data combined with the risk profile. You can likely find a doctor who will throw a prednisone script at you if you're aggressive enough about it, but that doesn't make it a good idea.

Just my .02, I'm not a doctor and think people should basically take whatever drugs they want. But, the OP here didn't have a gun go off next to their head, someone slammed a door. Unless you live in the woods like I do, if you go popping steroids every time a balloon pops or someone slams a door, it's definitely going to catch up to you sooner or later.

 

Perhaps you are right about oral steroids. But what about steroid injections?
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/studies-of-effectiveness-of-it-dexamethasone-injection.21616/