Hate and Distrust

Not unlike priests of yore, twenty-first century doctors have taken their places in fabricating outrageous requests for blind faith accompanied by all sorts of excuses for promises unfulfilled. Patients everywhere understand that a doctor's failure is derived mostly due to ignorance, but since we, the patients, are also ignorant we temporarily cast wariness aside long enough to trust the white coat and the wall diplomas and certificates certified by other doctors.

You know the chants:

"Trust me, I know what I'm doing."
"Well, everyone is different."
"You'll be better within ____ months."
"If only you had come to me sooner."
"Which one of us... (1) went to medical school? (2) knows what's taking place?"
"This medication has worked before."
"I'm going to refer you to another (equally inept) doctor."
"I don't get kickbacks from the pharmaceutical industry."

And a hundred other groan-inducing and eye-rolling clichés....

The ALT-MED establishment and its similar barrage of unproven claims is no better. Oftentimes it is equally expensive and, hopefully, equally harmless. Other instances will plunk onto an ambulance stretcher where you will wind up in the Temple of All Surrender, the emergency room.

Accompanying the chants physicians once bled us from the wrists. Now, with the same lunacy we are bled from the purse.

Aches, debilitation and other Life's bothersome interruptions (tinnitus, for one, eh?) can unnerve and worse, destroy.

Answers? No, sorry.

Lessons? Yes. Trust none of them. Your instincts (part from wishful thinking) are better.

 

I've said this before but it's worth saying again. One of the ENTs I saw told me he has given his patients tinnitus by using an ear suction machine for wax.

He scoffed at his own admission of this and said that it "isn't even that loud" after he flipped the switch to show me. Just the sound of the suction alone was so loud he had to yell over the sound of it to tell me that it wasn't loud.

If you didn't know better, and needed a wax cleaning and went to that fucking idiot, there is a very good chance you would leave with tinnitus, and certainly with some level of damage.

The fact that he still has a medical license after violating the Hippocratic oath knowingly and repeatedly is all I need to know about how much trust we should place in doctors. (Among many other reasons like you have pointed out.)

 

@Clinton Ross, I understand what you mean. My trust in the medical world took a devastating blow when I heard that Frequency Therapeutics recently had very disappointing results regarding their latest FX-322 trial. David Lucchino, their CEO, obviously knew about this, but deliberately kept silent and quickly sold his Frequency Therapeutics shares, thus making tens of millions of dollars. A little later the bad results were made public and the Frequency Therapeutics share took a deep dive, losing more than half of its value. It makes you wonder what kind of people are they? Are they trying to help people who have tinnitus, or are they just trying to fill their pockets? I'm so sick of all these reports about "a cure". I've been hearing that rubbish for the past 10 years, and nothing has changed. There is no cure. Period. Stop giving people false hope, and stop trying to make them pay for "a cure". It's emotional blackmail. I've accepted my tinnitus, and I have accepted the fact that it will be my unwanted companion for the rest of my life.

 

To Clinton Ross and Peter61:

I couldn't have said it any better. My arrival at your various conclusions occurred when in December 2016 I spent $5,267.00 on that allegedly "revolutionary" Desyncra; I wore their headset for 36 weeks, and it was as useless as shining a flashlight on my head would have been.

Those f**kers were also going to charge me extra for a second "course", if I wanted their device turned back on (and they are no longer in business).

After this fiasco, my wife saw me reading the Lenire website, and she said "Don't you f**king dare withdraw any more money from your 401k to pay for another outrageously expensive, useless, scientifically questionable cockamamie "cure", even if it is accompanied by all sorts of graphs, charts, stats, etc. from ostensibly credentialed personages."

This morning our Chicago Tribune had a full page Ad for hearing aids that showed an older guy with his index finger in his ear; the caption read "Tinnitus is driving me nuts!" The frankly very limited value of hearing aids regarding tinnitus (in some instances, people report that it made theirs worse) is being touted as a godsending solution.

It's a for-profit Medical Industry that standardizes the promotion of such placebo junk.

 

Can I add shock and disgust to the list?

 

The dark ages we live in regarding tinnitus and hyperacusis are a consequence of decades of Jastreboff and his money-grubbing coping industry rule, that keep using the mantra of "problem's not your tinnitus but your reaction to it" and this is what the clueless ENTs learn in med school about our condition.

I swear that if one day I decide I've had enough of this torture, I will take some Polish codger with me to the other side. Or maybe I'll just blast some very loud noise in his ear, and see how's his "reaction" to it

 

@Óscar PP, I agree with you, TRT never worked for me either. I can understand that regenerating hair cells is a bridge too far scientifically, it just sounds too unbelievable . I just don't believe in fairy tales, dead hair cells are dead...

But I'm not even talking about regenerating hair cells , I'm just talking about a drug that can take away the symptom, that can turn down the volume. And if I had to take that drug for the rest of my life, I'd gladly do so. It frustrates the hell out of me that they can't even come up with that! It's a bloody shame.

 

I literally watched an ENT give a bunch of med students a lecture on YouTube.

Paraphrase his words "tinnitus will make you easy money".

 

One dude with broken English is a doctor with tinnitus and injects himself with Lidocaine for relief.

If only we were that privileged.

 

Some medical practitioners are arrogant psychopaths who have never been questioned or told "no" because of the status holding a doctorate affords a person.

Some medical practitioners are incompetent scam artists who bought there medical degrees from The University of Corrupt and Don't Give a F*ck, but have never been exposed or barred, because humans/employers are generally lazy and inefficient, so would rather take what they see on paper at face value than investigate it's legitimacy.

Then there are some absolutely wonderful medical practitioners who are intelligent, kind and altruistic. If you ever find one of these doctors, like I have, hold on to them and show them your gratitude however/whenever you can.

 

I was very surprised to see so much hype about FX-322. To me it was fishy that suddenly so many people put so much hope on this, and decided to "believe" without questioning anything. There was too much unjustified hype about it.

It seems "believing" is trendy nowadays. One has to believe in the NASDAQ, the FED and FX-322, among others.

Repairing hearing, at the sensorineural level, must be really complicated, as the Organ of Corti must be the size of a pea, and there are tens of thousands of hair cells inside it. Then the neural connections and pathways have to be linked to those hair cells exactly right. The inner ear also has a liquid that has to be balanced, the endolymph. Then there's the hearing nerve... it's all really complicated and tiny, and has to be correctly wired.

Taking all that into account, I don't really think there will be a cure for tinnitus or hyperacusis for a long long time (probably several decades).

 

Damn sad but true.

 

It's arguably more complicated than sight.

 

Yes, much more complicated.