I Don't Like This Article... Makes Me Angry!

Yeah just accept folks and be happy. Yeah FU!

http://www.va.gov/health/NewsFeatures/20110524a.asp

 

It's annoying when doctors and ENTs say "nothing can be done about the noise in your head so the only possible treatment is to work on your reaction to the noise". Most of us feel that life would be a whole lot easier is something could actually be done to reduce the noise and that is why so many of us are interested in following the progress of clinical trials of drugs which may help us (AUT00063 etc.). But we also have to acknowledge that cognitive treatments do have a role to play in helping people manage their T. We don't need to choose one or the other - both drug-based and therapy-based approaches to tinnitus are worth pursuing.

The thing which really annoys me in the pessimism of ENTs and even tinnitus campaigners who stick to the mantra that there will never be a cure so you better learn to live with the condition. About a year ago, I attended a talk given by someone from Action on Hearing Loss who began by announcing that there is no cure for T and probably never will be. He then proceeded to demonstrate the usual range of sound generators available to order from the AHL catalogue..

The Veterans Affairs article covers the usual stuff (sound therapy/CBT etc) and the only disappointing thing is that it focuses exclusively on management of the condition while paying no attention to current developments in research which may actually treat the condition, not just the patients' reaction to it.

 

This is like learning to live in pain bull shit

 

At a price of ten iphones for one quarter the complexity. One more incentive for a cure to not be found.

 

Laziness is pretty much the standard in the medical community. They could be using their access to patients to build detailed statistical databases to come up with differential diagnosis, but instead they toss about the tinnitus handicap questionnaire without an inch of self-critical thought being put into it. Often, the conflict of interest lies in that meeting them is more about them justifying their office than it is about the patient getting a clue or a cure.

Veterans are ironically the biggest hope out there for the T/H/weird-ass-painful-reflex-TTTS crowd, as more people of our kind will pop up if TPTB want war, eventually they'll notice the waiter can't listen to their order for fillet mignon.

 

I don't understand the interpretation that people are being told to "just live with it". For example:

“A lot can be done for tinnitus”

“Patients have often been told to go home and learn to live with it, nothing can be done — and it’s really not true. A lot can be done for tinnitus,” said Dr. James Henry, PTM author and Research Professor in Otolaryngology at the Oregon Health & Science University."

 

Tinnitus will not be taken seriously, until the entire planet has it. Which by the way, appears to be happening, at a very rapid rate. So be of good cheer, you will soon be the 1 out of every 1, instead of the 1 out of every 10. Of course, there still won't be a cure! };-)

 

My ENT told me that here in Boston, so many people are suffering from T due to the marathon bombings so Mass Eye and Ear is starting to do a lot of research. Really? It took this long for a facility that specializes in hearing resulted conditions to start to do research?

And you really cannot get any treatment there for T. I know I tried.

 

IT would be a different story if the ENT had this high pitched shrill screetching noise 24/7....they would all have a different attitude if it happened to them. I'm not talking about a low hum, an annoyance that it seems most who have tinnitus "suffer" from, I'm talking about deafening, shrill, dog whistle 24/7 no sleep, no peace ever. It is not an easy thing to live with. I have chronic pain also and that is much easier to deal with than this. Yet we get no respect because all the authorities act like having tinnitus is no big deal so it's no wonder friends and family think you are just a big baby since all articles about tinnitus are so happy telling us all that can be done for it. Well nothing, and I mean nothing has worked for me other than Moses Lang CD track 10, which is a constant noise in the 12KHZ-14KHZ range that at least takes the shrillness down a peg or two so that I can get thru each long, long day.

 

And yet hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent, and hundreds of MDs and thousands of PhDs and clinicians are working on it...

hard problems are hard.

 

Nails it!

Is there a comprehensive list of all the underlying causes of tinnitus? Maybe some software which can walk you through automated triage and give you a probabilistic assessment so that you can prioritise your treatment.

If some of the information on this forum was organised in to a database, names of researchers, levels of funding, how much they need to get them to the next step. Then perhaps the phds with the skills can collaborate with us on this forum in real time. Maybe do some live hangouts on youtube?

A lot of people just have mild tinnitus. This should not be confused with those of us who have it so bad we are in pain. As someone elsewhere on this forum put it: "if you walked in to the surgery with a bleeding finger everyone would be rushing to help you"... quite!

 

You haven't spent much time in trauma wards or ERs, have you?

Trying to find ways to have a higher quality of life while still having a chronic condition isn't a good option, it's just that it's the only option if you've got a problem with your body that is beyond the reach of current medicine. This is true whether your issues are tinnitus, neuro Lyme, crps or Parkinson's.

I get that this condition makes us all unhappy and how easy it is to feel robbed. Believe me, I do. I think some people are expressing a pretty unrealistic expectation for what medicine should be capable of, though. As I said before, hard problems are hard. Putting men on the moon turns out to be pretty simple compared to trying to make very specific adjustments to very small clusters of misbehaving neurons... Even if you can figure out which ones are the problem, which is a big if.