Problem With the Idea That in Silence Everyone Will Start to Experience Tinnitus?

Really want to get this out there and read peoples thoughts on this.

I was reading Dr Nagler's answer to this question here..https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/tinnitus-research.5189/#post-52018 and I disagree with the good docs conclusion or opinion that there will never be a cure for T.
My problem is with this statement.
'If you take someone with perfect hearing and place them in a silent environment they will start to experience Tinnitus!' so because of this statement they come to this conclusion.."So the existence of tinnitus is a normal physiological phenomenon." Which in turn leads Dr Nagler to the conclusion that there will never be a cure for T because it is a normal physiological phenomenon!

I disagree!

Excluding fleeting T which we all know that every person on our planet with good functioning ears experience's fleeting T and maybe even people without functioning ears as well! ( have not researched if this happens in the total deaf person or not).
Which for me at least is usually a high pitch ring with temporary deafness (or what seems to be deafness) in the ear that has the fleeting T, It usually only lasts for a few seconds before clearing up and leaving no trace that it ever happened, just the memory.

T is not a normal function, it is a reaction from your brain to a problem, the same way that pain is a reaction and as scans of the brain has shown the neurons are firing randomly, obviously from some form of trauma or damage to any part of the auditory system, whether it be from disease, loud noise's or some other underlying problem that can go undetected and be diagnosed as an "I don't know how or why you got T".
It may be a so called physiological phenomenon but to call it normal is plain wrong IMO.

The so called Tinnitus that people without T get in a quiet environment is not the T that you or I have got all the time, for one thing ours is louder and if I may hazard a guess is a different tone to THE SOUND OF SILENCE that these people who describe the noise say that they hear in a quiet environment.
I make this statement because I remember before I had T when I valued my silence, I would deliberately put myself into the most quiet situations I could because I loved the sound of silence and I remember it well and guess what? it was way different to what I'm experiencing now and I wonder how many of these people who describe a noise in a quiet environment are in the percentage of people with T who don't let it concern them so are not experiencing the sound of silence at all but actually have T and didn't know it!

My 15 year old son can hear tones right up to 15000hz on the generalfuzz website so has pretty damn good hearing he has been in really quiet situations where he describes it as being so quiet that it starts to be a bit scary, when I asked him does he start to hear anything like tones, ringing, hissing etc he does not hear anything like that just the sound of silence.
Which leads me to believe that all people will experience T in quiet enough situations is not entirely right so therefore the T that we suffer with is a symptom that like all symptoms have a cause that given enough time and finances will have a cure eventually.

Halfway through writing this I decided to do some research on Heller & Bergman and low and behold I find that the study was very shabbily done in my view and to quote this study when coming to any conclusion about T is IMO not very thorough!

This is a direct quote from Bergman:
Yes, it was about the mid-1950s. I took 100 people with normal hearing and placed them in the sound booth for some 15 minutes or so. As you can imagine, more than 90 percent of them heard whistling, buzzing, and other sounds. Then I did the same thing with 100 people with hearing loss. The obvious conclusion was simply even people with normal hearing hear tinnitus, but because their hearing is so good, the everyday acoustic environment masks their ability to perceive their tinnitus.

This to me was not a very scientific study at all , allot of T sufferers have very good hearing yet loud tinnitus.
90% of people have extremely mild tinnitus that it is impossible to hear even in silent surroundings!

I think it is a very pessimistic and a defeatist view to think that a cure will never eventuate which I believe is derived from an opinion based on bad science and a view I do not share at all!

Look forward to anyone's thoughts on this.

Rich

 

I disagree, too.
Never had any problems with my ears, never had something like T, even I cannot remember fleeting T.
A stressful situation started T in my head like crazy.
It was like someone tuned up the volume from 0 to 100.
It is loud, high-pitched, screaming. This is something I would have recognized before, definitely.
I also loved quiet environments like being on a mountain.
Never heard something like T before.

 

That's maybe not totally false but certainly not true.

what dr nagler is describing is a situation that no brain ever encountered exept totally deaf people and still not so many totally deaf people do experience tinnitus.

this experiment took place in something that doesn't exist naturally, we don"t perceive any sounds in a silent room and that's because our ears are not made for that but a sound meter will show around 30DB.

even if we don"t hear anything, the ears/auditory cortex are still under stimulation even in a quiet room.

The only thing we have in common(tinnitus patients) is a detectable neuronal hyper activity in our auditory cortex, that's what needs to be adjusted, once it's done, the Tinnitus will be past history.

 

Disagree all you want. I just want to live a normal life with T. It can be done.

 

Normal phenomenon my a**.In my silent days I never experienced anything like this ever,I had been in totally soundproof rooms,almost dead silent environments and never did I hear a sound not a single one.I use to sit in my brothers room and look out at the stars for hours and his room is eerily silent but I never heard a single sound or anything that resembled a sound and I never experienced fleeting T either,to be honest I had never even heard of T.If somebody becomes extremely sensitive to light and begins seeing things that arent there would you consider this a normal phenomenon??No of course you wouldnt and the conclusion by any doctor would be that there is something obviously wrong either with the eye,optic nerve or possibley the brain but most certainly wouldnt brush this off as being normal,in what way is this normal??Its the same with T and H,you have become sensitive to sound and are hearing things that arent there so explain how this for one second is considered normal.Lots of people experience H and sensitivity to light when they are diagnosed with meningitis and these are considered symptoms of something wrong obviously the meningitis is to blame but once this is resolved these symptoms disappear as the problem has been fixed and why isnt this considered the case with T and H.Without doubt once the root cause has been identified and treated T and H will cease to exist.

 

if you've been trying for the past 24 years, i'm not really sure you gonna succeed any time soon.

 

@Valentin thank you for your support. MY history is I've had a few relapses but each time I habituated. I am currently in another relapse after ten years of habituation. What I meant is one can learn to live with T.

 

Which is my point exactly. Excellent, Ken.

Friends, if your strategy for getting back to living a normal life is to wait around hoping and hoping for a cure, you are likely to be very disappointed.

Look at other strategies for resuming a normal life, and then if a cure comes along it will be a bonus rather than some sort of deal-breaker.

Stephen Nagler

 

TRT is certainly a proocol with a succesful track record, but the whole TRT crowd is a bit like a cult in regards to groupthink... the whole idea of silence being unnatural is laughable, flat earth like stuff

 

the fact that someone like ken habituated ... And then has a noise increase and has to start over again is proof that habituation, trt, cbt are not adequate treatments... simply the best protocols available at the moment... making statements like a cure will likely never be found for a condition with very little previous research funding reveals certain people's agenda

 

I find the above to be highly offensive.

I do not believe there will ever be a cure and have explained why in detail. But I have donated thousands and thousands of dollars to tinnitus research in the hopes that I am wrong.

My "agenda" is that nobody should suffer from tinnitus even one more day than absolutely necessary. Do you really have a problem with that?

Stephen Nagler

 

@Mpt A cure would be great! But right now Habituation is the only choice. How I get there can be debated till the sun don't shine. I believe this time a virus gave me Vertigo and increased the tinnitus level. The dizziness appears to be gone but the spike is still there. Has anybody had this and by any chance did the spike decreased? I'm also not sure when I relapse the noise is worse than the last relapse?

 

If those "thousands of dollars" went to the ata I doubt they funded any research on the biochemical mechanisms of tinnitus... severe tinnitus sufferers have been underserved by the tinnitus establishment of which you, whether you view yourself that way or not, are one.... your words helped me greatly when I was really suffering, but the world isn't a black and white place, and the fact that trt, habituation, etc help many people... this habituation gives you your life back cure or not attitude is part of the problem

 

agenda was the wrong word to use and I apologize for that

 

If T is a so called natural phenomenon that everyone experiences in ultra quiet settings how do you explain reactive T??T that reacts to sound either by increasing or decreasing,pretty sure the normal population have never experienced this.

 

I certainly agree with this. I'm not going to wait around for a cure, or even hope for one; to me that's energy lost.

I've had tinnitus for 15 months now. I had a very difficult time at first, always hoping it would go away. Once I changed my strategy to learning how to accept T instead waiting in vain for it to go away, I got back to normal relatively quickly.

I suppose the same can be said for a cure. It would be nice if one is developed. Until then, I'll keep on living.

 

So much for healthy debate I see the thread has gone off in all sorts of directions.

Sigh!

 

My point is that people with so called normal hearing that Heller & Bergman used were adults(100) with tests done in the normal speech range and the fact that only 90% of them experienced any noise tells me that the experiment was floored, it was done in the 50's, and as far as scientific experiments go in Bergmans own words was very amateur to say the least!

Who's to say that 90 % of them didn't have very slight T to begin with? The fact 10% of them didn't perceive any noise should tell you that that was an inconclusive test and throws that theory that everyone perceives noise in a quiet environment out the window straight away!

No one in the 1950's used hearing protection maybe the odd one but on the whole the whole ear protection thing wasn't even thought about! That should tell you straight away that 90 of those people could very well have had hearing damage and T and it wouldn't have been picked up!

My point is that Dr Nagler based his opinion, that there will never be a cure, on that experiment which I have shown is floored!

 

Then may I ask you why you base your opinion on a study done 60 years ago which, besides being outdated and poorly conducted, is so floored the holes are more obvious than a colanders?

 

This is my point I do not believe it is natural phenomenon and when a proper controlled experiment is done then we will know for sure but to say it is based on a 60 year old floored experiment is plan ludicrous!

 

My question is why hasn't anyone done the same study since?
Sure in this time and age it would be fairly easy to do it and with today's technology results may be bit more accurate.
By the way, I totally disagree with that study as I know what I "heard" before and what I hear now.

 

The results fit what the people in trt land want to believe ... That's why it's nt questioned

 

Hence my question for Dr Nagler!

 

The study has been repeated twice to my knowledge, with the same result each time.

Stephen Nagler

 

Both with a 90% hit rate?
Please if you would, some links to these recent study's would be appreciated.

 

Please people can we agree to disagree? We are here to support each other.

 

One of the studies has not yet been published, but I have seen the data. The other study was published, but I do not have the reference at my disposal. I am sure that @Markku or one of the other managers here can provide it for you.

Stephen Nagler

 

With all due respect Ken, I started this thread because I object to poorly informed advice or opinions directed at people who are suffering from this horrid disease and not seeing any light at the end of the tunnel.
This thread was designed to provoke debate not for us to agree to disagree without even an once of a debate!

Rich

 

Thank you for your response.
I have found one of these study's, in fact the only one I can find after combing the net, and I'm afraid Dr Nagler it does not back up your assumption that it is a common occurrence, or normal one, that every person perceives in a silent situation!
file:///C:/Users/Rich/Downloads/S_Phillips_Effect_2005%20(Multi%20UNCG%20Author).pdf

As you well can see 67% is not the 90% that the study in 1953 gave us!

I think I may well be able to rest my case.

Rich

 

habituation....cbt..trt..studies..at the end of the day each road leads to my ENT cold words
"Get over it."
Change your diet and protect your ears from now on. Dr. Has a point my whole family hears noise in silence.