GT Academy Champion Wolfgang Reip Reveals Battle with Hyperacusis

A former Belgian racer has recently revealed on his social media that he has hyperacusis, and quite severe. He has launched a fundraiser for Hyperacusis Research which has almost collected 4000 euros!

GT Academy Champion Wolfgang Reip Reveals Battle With Hearing Disorder – GTPlanet

 

Nice find. So hyperacusis is getting a bit more public attention. Motorsport is so insanely loud that it is quite probable some develop hyperacusis. Unfortunately Wolfgang Reip is not so well known like Michael Schumacher for example.

 

Every little bit helps I guess!

 

An article on Racer.com published yesterday, 1 March 2022:

Former GT racer Wolfgang Reip urges the industry to confront acoustic trauma

Wolfgang Reip — winner of the European GT Academy in 2012, the Blancpain Pro Cup Endurance GT Series in 2015 and the Bathurst 12H in 2015 — thought he would be racing the rest of his life.

Now, he can barely drive on the highway.

Reip started karting as a child growing up in Belgium. “Everything in my little world revolved around racing,” he said. He raced professionally for eight years. Noise was part of the fun. “In racing, the noisier a car is, the more people love it.”

Now, Reip suffers from a severe injury — acoustic trauma, caused by constant exposure to noise that he didn’t know could cause permanent harm.

Earlier this year, Reip announced on Facebook that he was disabled by noise.

“When we think of disability, we think of a missing limb or paralysis,” he wrote. “My disability is invisible, yet it is extremely debilitating and has transformed my life.”

 

Praying we all get cured soon and no one has to suffer from hyperacusis anymore.

 

I just came across Wolfgang's story. Too bad I did not earlier, I was into cars, not much into motorsports, but this could have been news that would have saved me if I came across it in time.

My realization is this - a disease needs to be common enough and bad enough in order to spread awareness. Turns out tinnitus is common enough, but not bad enough for most, making the awareness poor, and not talking about it makes things worse. It is very insidious, but I can believe that not talking about it is part of the coping strategy.

The awareness will remain poor until someone very famous gets hit by it bad. I guess if it was Schumacher who got hyperacusis that put him out of racing career, we would have all known about it by now, just like we know about his unfortunate skiing accident. This poor guy, Wolfgang, unfortunately is not famous enough.

We know about Parkinson's mostly because of Michael J. Fox and John Paul II. Both famous enough for the disease to reach public awareness. In this case, the awareness is useless in prevention, though obviously Fox and others contributed greatly to fundraising to sponsor research.

The irony is, while we sufferers would like to see similar fundraising for tinnitus and hyperacusis to help find a cure, just plain awareness would be sufficient for many to avoid it. And that's before noise regulations and enforcement which could further improve the situation.

I don't wish hyperacusis on anyone, but indeed if some mogul like Musk or Bezos, a celebrity like Clooney or Cruise, or a politician like Obama or Trump, suddenly got a bad case of hyperacusis, the tide would change.

 

@gameover, do you happen to remember William Shatner talking about his tinnitus? I did but didn’t think that would ever happen to me.

 

No. I did not even know the guy's name. My kids were fans of Star Trek, I never could watch it. Not sure how. My wife bought them a set of DVDs. Unusual because typically I was the one buying movies (we never had TV service at home). And I never spent 10 minutes watching it, literally. Just did not care for it. The retro feel put me off in an instant. Not sure why.

I learned his name later when I started searching. I suppose indeed he is the most famous one with tinnitus. Perhaps too old school / forgotten by now?

The information was there, I guess, but I remained 100% ignorant. Truly. Part of the reason I will not forgive myself, nor forgive others who did not share the information when they could.

P.S.

I just talked to my wife regarding this. Star Trek wasn't on TV in the country I am from until I went to college. I stopped watching TV, then never watched it again - I had TV at my childhood home, but never at my home.

Beats me why I never spent time watching it with my kids as they kept rewatching the DVDs (I think they had the whole thing). Somehow I did not care for it, I was too busy, etc...

I am a movie buff (I had a pretty high end home theater setup at one time, with a ~$3k 1080p projector, high end surround sound system, etc). TV shows weren't my thing, with a handful of exceptions. "Snobbery"?

 

William Shatner got tinnitus but not hyperacusis - and he fell in with Jastreboff and actually comments quite openly that TRT 'worked' for his tinnitus.

He describes his tinnitus as the hissing variety and although we will never know how his volume compares to ours, he has been able to go back to acting, stage presence and even a trip to space - so unfortunately Shatner, although one of the highest profile celebrities to come forward with it, doesn't seem to be at the severity levels many on Tinnitus Talk are.

We'll never know but from his story it sounds as if his tinnitus was milder, but he struggled with it.

Tinnitus is relatively common but bad tinnitus is rare, reactive tinnitus is rarer still and hyperacusis is very rare.

Amazing how David Schwimmer gets hyperacusis and tinnitus and is back on set 7 months later- and then avoids talking about it.

I don't know what it would take, but with 750 million people who have tinnitus, including so many rich and well connected musicians (plus people who are connected with the rich and famous that struggle with tinnitus) - I can't see much happening on that front that will change many people's opinion.

Especially when tinnitus TRT advocate himself, Jastreboff, dismisses anyone who complains of having it severe as just whining or looking for money to line his own pocket and boost his own ego.

 

I watched Star Trek and the Star Trek movies that came out later, but I never knew anything about Shatner having tinnitus until my condition worsened suddenly in early 2022. That's when I also found out David Letterman had tinnitus, and he took an SSRI for depression. And there are quite a few well known people who have tinnitus, but most cases are mild, so you never know if it's as bad as some of those on Tinnitus Talk, not to mention whether they have hyperacusis and how bad that might be.

 

Imagine if he got hyperacusis? Oh man, how quickly his tune would change.

 

One other problem with him is that he got tinnitus from an explosion. Most of us do not get exposed to explosives. So the mental model is indeed "huge explosion -> mild tinnitus".

Anyway, I just would have wanted to know about tinnitus earlier and understand the link to loud noise. I think the only place I saw tinnitus mentioned were some spam emails (oh, irony). I wish I had paid attention to them. As mentioned elsewhere, I also knew about antibiotic induced tinnitus that my wife's brother has had since early teens. I wish I had paid more attention to it. Hyperacusis I had never heard of, I could not imagine such a thing to even exist.

Our best bet were musicians but they failed us. Apparently Sting, Phil Collins, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Neil Young, Moby have (had) it - all these guys I liked, listened to their music, but I guess I did not pay close enough attention to them. They hid it pretty well. There is also Pete Townshend I did not know about.

 

Pete Townshend described his tinnitus on a night talk show, and it sounded the same volume and tone as mine that I had for 44 years and wasn't bothered in the slightest about.

It's just rare I'm afraid for anyone to get tinnitus bad, and when it can't be measured, everyone is labelled exactly the same.

 

William Shatner and his co-actor Leonard Nimoy both got tinnitus from the same event. Nimoy coped better.

Subsequently they both got water fountains installed in their homes.

Shatner had to do TRT twice before it worked for him. He describes having two stable tones, so it sounds like a mild-to-moderate case.

It certainly didn't affect his acting career or income.

We, the MAJORITY of those who post and hang around on this forum for months (and years?), are the severe and catastrophic cases, the MINORITY of tinnitus cases worldwide.

It's a horribly frustrating position to be. No one can understand because the suffering is so unbelievable yet at the same time invisible.

We help and support one another, that is the best we can do on this forum.