Episode 4: Tinnitus Management: Who Cares? — Richard Tyler, PhD

[Tinnitus Talk]

Hey there everyone!

How can clinicians and patients work together? Why is tinnitus sub-typing important? Does loudness matter? What does habituation really mean? What different forms of counselling and treatment are available for tinnitus? These are some of the questions addressed in this episode.

Tinnitus Talk spoke with Richard Tyler, from the University of Iowa. His career in tinnitus spans many decades. He has vast experience in both tinnitus research and patient care and is passionate about connecting those two worlds.

Richard also talks about the annual conference on tinnitus management that he is organising this year for the 27th time in Iowa. The conference is open to patients.

If you want to take part in Richard's "Random Acts of Tinnitus Relief" project – which he talks about at 53:28 – you can email him at tinnitus2@healthcare.uiowa.edu.

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Listen on:

• Tinnitus Talk Podcast (incl. timestamps and transcript)
  
• SoundCloud
  
• iTunes
  
• Spotify

We welcome any discussion, but please keep the following in mind when commenting:

• Off-topic comments, i.e. not directly responding to the content of the podcast, will be removed. So please do listen before commenting!
• While we welcome constructive criticism on ideas or policies, we do not tolerate direct attacks on individuals.

This episode was produced, as usual, by @Markku, @Jack Straw and @Hazel. Do you want to join our team as well? Let us know!

Here's a teaser for our upcoming episodes. We have quite a few things in the pipeline:

• We interviewed Luisa Scott, the Chief Scientific Officer and founder of Cognosetta, a drug discovery company advancing pharmaceutical therapies for tinnitus;
• We interviewed Marcelo Rivolta, a stem cell researcher focusing on hearing regeneration;
• We interviewed Winfried Schlee, the scientific coordinator of the Tinnitus Research Initiative;
• And we interviewed two of the authors of the new European Clinical Practice Guidelines for tinnitus.

So a lot of exciting things coming up! We just need to figure out in what order to publish these interviews, and conduct the editing, which is always quite a chore.

Don't forget to:

• Send Ideas and Suggestions for Future Podcast Episodes

Sharing Is Caring
Share the podcast on your social media and with your tinnitus friends!

 

[Starthrower]

How to help new severe tinnitus patients: deal with the anxiety first. Monitored Therapy and anxiety medication.
Excellent.

I never heard of any cases where CIs lessened or made tinnitus go away. Hearing better? From personal experience talking with CI patients the hearing was different. More robotic in nature rather than normal like we are used to.

Excellent at @Jack Straw - Interesting so far will finish the rest tomorrow. Your interviews are professional.
Thanks for the time.

 

[jay777]

Thank you everyone for your time and effort.

This podcast did not give me much hope. I have a severed artery. I do not need more band aids.

 

[Hazel]

This podcast did not give me much hope. I have a severed artery. I do not need more band aids.

We have more 'hopeful' episodes coming up soon, including an interview with a stem cell researcher. But in the meantime, we also feel it's important to provide guidance with regards to to what's currently available.

And remember: Send Ideas and Suggestions for Future Podcast Episodes

We want to meet the needs out there, but need your input!

In the meantime, I was hoping to get a few more reactions on this episode...

 

[Jcb]

Again thanks for these podcasts. I really enjoy them and I know all the hard work that goes into these and @Jack Straw's smooth radio voice of course, haha. This episode was not my favourite if I'm honest but I know some people will enjoy this and find it helpful.

I appreciate all the different episodes and subjects you are all introducing so please don't take this as me being ungrateful for which I am not.

 

[Johnny B]

It was helpful to hear that setting a sound generator volume level low, as opposed to just below the mixing point may be a better strategy. I have been trying to wear sound generators with white noise for months, and tried to set the sound at the 'prescribed' level and have often felt that the sound was 'blowing up' my ears, i.e. making my tinnitus louder. I am now going to try setting the sound level just above hearing threshold, as an experiment to see what happens. What have I got to lose?

That one tip made the whole podcast valuable to me. Thank you Richard and Tinnitus Talk!

 

[Hazel]

It was helpful to hear that setting a sound generator volume level low, as opposed to just below the mixing point may be a better strategy. I have been trying to wear sound generators with white noise for months, and tried to set the sound at the 'prescribed' level and have often felt that the sound was 'blowing up' my ears, i.e. making my tinnitus louder. I am now going to try setting the sound level just above hearing threshold, as an experiment to see what happens. What have I got to lose?

I have the same experience with masking; it's tricky to get it right and sometimes it just seems to trigger my tinnitus even more. Glad you found it useful

 

[Watasha]

Loved the podcast. Seems like a reasonable guy!

 

[Frédéric]

From Richard Tyler:

A Preliminary Study of Tinnitus Subgroups based on Self-reported Presbyacusis and Noise Induced Hearing Loss

https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr245650