South Korean Clinic Treatment (Dr. Minbo Shim)

For exactly the reason you mentioned. The recovery mechanism is different, and there’s a short window for treatment. You cannot compare a recovery from SSHL with SNHL, because you will not achieve the same results.

PRP may have some healing qualities, but I can’t see how it will regenerate dead hair cells.

 

That’s another thing I find odd. The way he offers sales like buy one ear and get the other one free. In a professional medical setting, the price should be the price.

Why’s he charging some people $6000 - $8000?

Again, I can’t figure out the attraction to him. Would you have experimental surgery on your vital organs from a man in a different country, with no published data and/or third party patient testimonials?

There is an air of Dr Shamesh about him, and I say this because he is taking vast amounts of money from desperate people using a treatment that has no scientific basis. Morally speaking, if I was in his position I wouldn’t take a dime off people until I had proven my method was efficacious.

You all seem to be making excuses for him rather than looking at this objectively and neutrally.

 

People go to different countries all the time for stem cell therapy and it costs a fortune. I like your points and Steven Heller from Stanford said the same as you. Having said that ENTs in America, my home country, fuck up all the time and often cause permanent damage. I don't even know if anyone does this procedure in America. We are desperate, that's why people turn to PrP and stem cells. What's the alternative? He shows pretty decent results, and as far as the pricing go, that is not unusual in Asia, at least where I live in Asia. I am not surprised or taken back at all about the pricing.

Don't play the moral high ground card please, if his claims are true then he is a saint. If he is lying, well, that is immoral and cold blooded. I am poor, I teach kids, and believe me, generally nobody gives a shit, parents , school board...only the kids do, and the pay is low. Most doctors in the States who are very good get rich. They argue, that is the payback for working hard, going to med school, being capable and smart. I digress... sorry...

I ask you Ed209, what do you think one should do who has hearing loss and tinnitus that is bad? I am honestly open and really appreciate your skepticism and logic. Please believe that, it is sincere.

Shim has testimonials of people that experienced change and improvement.
The LEVO system is pretty expensive and does nothing for a person's hearing or tinnitus, it helps the brain ignore effectively.

What would you advise the die hard Shim devotees? That includes me.

 

Artemis, what made you change your mind because I agree with every point you made here?

He says he was the first Dr in the world to successfully finish clinical studies on hearing regeneration in 2014. That’s 4/5 years ago and yet nobody has heard of him! This is ground breaking stuff.



Someone needs to inform Frequency, Decibel, Novartis, Regain, etc, that someone beat them to it years ago, and is successful at it.

Doesn’t this seem odd to any of you? If he is legitimately restoring hearing, then all I can say is he isn’t doing himself justice by keeping this to himself. He has had 4 years to have his method independently validated but has chosen not to, and you have to ask yourselves why? He should be world renowned by now.

Coming at this from a neutral standpoint, all I can say is that something seriously doesn’t add up, but if he is legitimately restoring people’s hearing, then all the best to him. However, for a top professional, he has a very odd way of conducting his business.

Anyway, that’s my assessment and I think I’ve done enough jabbering to last a lifetime.

 

I completely agree and that’s not what I’m trying to say. People generally do a lot of research before they undertake a procedure, but what is there to find about Dr Shim? He is like a ghost with no studies on his work (to validate it) and it’s near impossible to find reviews about him that aren’t posted by him.

Most people will choose an accredited surgeon, with published work in their field (this is essential if it’s cutting edge stuff), and who has easy to find verified patient reviews.

That’s my entire point, though: if! He is charging people $6,000 and they feel like they are gambling with him. Whenever you have any procedure done you should not be questioning the practitioner, ever. There should be enough information about their work for people to form a diligent opinion.

 

I would not go to Dr Shim unless he publishes his work so that other clinicians can validate it. I would like to see other Drs replicate his procedure.

Why aren’t there any other Drs doing what he is? I checked to see if anyone else is performing similar procedures in South Korea, and it seems HBOT plus steroids is still the number 1 protocol for treating hearing loss. And this is only if you catch it early.

I'll post an excerpt from an article for September 27th, 2018:

A review of the collected evidence suggests that -- added to standard drug therapy -- hyperbaric oxygen treatment "is the most beneficial treatment option" for what doctors call "sudden sensorineural hearing loss," according to a team led by Dr. Tae-Min Rhee. He's a specialist in hyperbaric medicine at the National Maritime Medical Center in Seoul.

One expert in the United States explained that this type of sudden hearing loss is rare but very troubling to patients.

https://www.upi.com/Health_News/201...herapy-for-sudden-hearing-loss/1131538105288/

Levo sounds like a complete waste of time to me, so that’s not something I’d jump to recommend. The only thing we currently have that is actually on the horizon is the Neuromod Device. Personally, I’d give that a go when it comes out.

Other than that, I’d wait for news on the many hearing regeneration drugs. I totally sympathise with the position you’re in and I know how horrendous it can be. This condition can torment a person in ways that other people just don’t realise, and I’ve been there with you. I truly wish that there was a treatment out there that could help everyone.

 

Asians have 2-tier pricing for locals and foreigners.

 

He has random sales where he reduces his price, apparently.

 

1. I had enough evidence that he was an ENT online.

2. The science I read made me more open-minded and started making me believe it was possible. Even John, who was skeptical at first, became more open to the idea after he did a lot of digging, and he has a better background in looking through this than most of us.

3. Before reading about him, I spent years looking up ecommerce on things like reselling, affiliate marketing, copywriting, Kindle book making, drop shipping, Amazon wholesale, private labeling, etc, and spent a lot of time interacting with many people trying to promote courses on how to do tricks to be successful with them. All of what I mentioned are legitimate ways to make extra money, and you can even make a living off of them once you get good enough, but at first I was not convinced on several of these. There were far too many extremely shady people promoting courses that were made without passion, helpful information, and many of them had ridiculous prices to go along with their half-assed courses. I ran into a lot of people who I thought were genuine but were actually complete bull crap after I took another look. This made me lose faith in the idea of making side income. I wanted an escape from family drama that was productive and let me make something of myself, but I got too depressed when I started to believe all my efforts were a waste. A long period after, I started looking at that stuff again, particularly reselling and affiliate marketing. I thought maybe I was missing some things, and began looking more on how it all worked, and many other examples. It turned out that quite a few people I thought were full of crap were actually honest, but it took me a second and more detailed look to realize that. Throughout the many shady people I saw, there were enough honest people, and all that time doubting I could have made side income sooner. During some semesters of college I made a few thousand dollars, and I know full well I would be making more if I had more free time. I would have made more overall if I didn't dismiss so much in the past. Thanks to so much garbage people, it took me a lot of time to find the good people who were an actual help, and many of the good people I quickly judged as phony in the past just because they were too optimistic and appeared weird. I regret that. I learned how important it was to be more analytical and give second looks. It's not wise to dismiss stuff so easily unless you have supportable evidence. That's a large reason why I haven't given up talking about Shim. I don't want to dismiss this so casually and find out I was wrong. I would rather see this to the end and then find out I was wrong, though I am hoping I'm right. It's very much possible, but I don't want to have similar regrets like I did with the stuff I mentioned in the past.

4. After a lot of background research, and actual interaction with him, I started to think he was honest. He didn't have the kind of shady responses to me that the phony ecommerce "gurus" gave me in the past. Instead of the typical half answer and "why don't you buy my product to find out?", he was very open to me, talked about how his treatment worked, and was willing to have lengthy discussions that didn't lead to much when he had time, and even talked about his personal life a bit. He knew very well it was possible I might not end up getting the treatment for a long time (if at all) because of my financial situation, and yet was willing to have lengthy discussions about his profession and the science around it. I don't think someone who was trying to scam another person would spend so much of his time like that. That's definitely not what I experienced with the "gurus". Also, I even suggested to him (not word for word) that if he was really a scammer, he'd be inches away from living Hell, because what he is promoting... if it didn't work for a few people in the way he has promised, TinnitusTalk would not let it go, and we'd make sure he'd lose his ENT license. This isn't a matter of "oh it's your fault because you didn't follow my course/plan right" or "oh I guess you aren't the right kind of person." What he is promising is something that would work for almost everyone, and it would be very quick to conclude he was phony after a handful of patients that didn't work out. If he was a scammer, he'd be the stupidest scammer I'd ever seen, and I have definitely come across plenty. What he is promoting would end his career quickly, and ENTs make a lot of money on their own. Why would someone risk years of medical training and a profitable career for a fake treatment with promises that someone would be able to immediately tell he was a fraud after the treatment? He's not even making that much money off each treatment. Truthfully, he'd be in a lot of trouble after a few failures, especially from us. Why is he talking to us then? If he was a fraud, it'd mean he wanted to be caught. It'd mean that he'd want to lose his ENT license and perhaps even his freedom. A daredevil like that would not make much sense in the real world.

5. In the past I was very depressed. Really, I was a mess, and even considered suicide because of so much problems in my life, tinnitus and hearing loss included. I was going through a lot of pain. However, somehow I ended up being better and more optimistic after all that time researching about Minbo Shim. I felt this was reasonable hope, and I had no way of thinking otherwise until some people we knew actually did the treatments. For whatever reason, this ended up helping me out a lot, and my life has been so much better. Now, I just want to see this through, and not have this discussion going around in circles.

6. What you quoted had flaws to the logic. For one thing, that was more so an English domain park that he wasn't taking as seriously. His Korean sites looked so much better and had more information and history in them. Granted, he should have taken English-speaking medical tourists more seriously, and invested in better marketing/web design with good translation, but he was already doing plenty with his Korean site. I did find out that the Sales Fiesta thing was an actual Korean business tradition much like the sales weekend we have with Black Friday through Cyber Monday, so he didn't make that part up on the fly. I also now think that having such discounts is probably a decent attractive marketing strategy if he was honest. Granted, it would be a very minimum profit if it takes a lot of time to do, but I don't see that very wrong. It's weird, yes, but $3,000 (what it was half off at the time) is much more reasonable that the THOUSANDS of dollars many Stem cell clinics charge.

7. He has spent a LOT of money traveling to Russia, USA, and the Middle East. He did this traveling for medical research and medical tourism. He has also spent a lot of money on running multiple clinics with multiple employees (which I found on Facebook) This goes back to several points I made earlier. His clinics were traceable on Google Maps, had photos, and even videos of one of his clinics were around with some of the employees I saw on Facebook. He also is part of a medical organization that has seminars that probably is also pretty expensive to be a part of. So, how can he be spending all this money, and be practicing regenerative treatments on the ear and nose that would easily be obvious if it was fraud? South Korea is a very advanced country with their own medical ethics laws. He would be arrested and fined if he was a fraud, and yet he's been around for years. There is SO MUCH risk and expenses and that's why I began to believe that it's more believable for him to be genuine than it is for him to be a phony.

There was an 8 I was going to write, but I don't remember it because my aunt called. I'll probably remember later. However, there are so many variables on why I started to think why this was legitimate. I'll get back to this later.

 

@Ed209
How can you explain the fact that Minbo Shim along with other scientists were invited by Russian government to Khabarovk, Russia to exchange knowledge with Russian doctors?
There is literal video proof of that. It was even showed in the news on national TV...

You sure like to write lengthy posts about that "there is no proof", but you choose to omit the fact that he was invited by government. Or are you suggesting that he has created such an elaborate fraud that made Russian government think that he has useful knowledge he could share with Russian doctors?

Have you ever stopped youself for a moment to think about that?

 

Eddie boy, you're acting like he's claiming to raise the dead. It's just basically a PRP injection with some vitamins and sometimes human stem cells. They do similar things that all over the place. PRP has been shown to heal all kinds of stuff, it's not as far fetched as you're making it out to be that it may also heal our cochlear wounds. Platelets are actually what heal all wounds in the human body. There's verification that some of the components in PRP are implicated in regeneration of damaged hair cells etc.

yeah, there's no government sponsored trials and it's not acknowledged in the mainstream. you're just wanting a government/corporate stamp of approval saying they jumped through all of their hoops.

it's obvious you're just trying to litter every page of this thread with fear mongering as if you're protecting the world from this man.

why aren't you all over that thread where that guy is peddling random noises that cure government mind control along with tinnitus?

 

I'll be fair, there is a language barrier. I can't expect him to understand everything. Heck, even I didn't know he was actually invited by the government of Russia. That's impressive. Though, honestly I feel like I should have known this...

 

I’ve seen all the videos and am very aware of this. I believe the guy is an ENT so there’s nothing unusual about going to other countries, this should be expected. Most Drs do this.

Because there is no proof! He claims he discovered this 5 years ago and there’s not a single peer-reviewed study about it. In fact, Minbo Shim has never published any study; these are the facts. I find this hard to believe for such a cutting edge pioneer. People who research innovative ideas usually have many papers.

Measuring hearing thresholds is a very grey area. I’ve already pointed out that my own audiograms have improved by up to 25dB. There are many questions about what he actually does, and how the audiograms are done, etc.

I didn’t post here just to annoy you all. I’m raising genuine concerns that have remained unanswered for many years, but some of you are blindly defending him. He needs to get his stuff together if he wants to be taken seriously by the medical community. And also, why post a video of your patent on the homepage of your website? That patent is worthless and is easily replaceable.

I’ve said what I think now anyway. There’s nothing else I can add.

 

I’m trying to bring balance and objective thinking. I’m neutral and am far from fear mongering. I want to bring some rationality here. I shouldn’t need to question all these things; his work should speak for itself, but there are just so many red flags to consider.

PRP is controversial amongst the medical community.

Absolutely not. I’m waiting for him to get his own work validated, and this has nothing to do with governments. In 5 years he’s the only guy doing this? And he supplies his own evidence? Let somebody else confirm it’s true for you; this isn’t rocket science. The floodgates would well and truly open if he did this and he’d likely be headhunted and running the ENT department of a prestigious hospital now, rather than working out of a shopping mall.

I’m not forcing my view on anybody. I’m just saying it as I see it and people are free to dismiss what I think.

 

the medical community is unto itself the most controversial thing in the world.

 

here's logic:

1. platelets are in the blood.
2. platelets are what heal wounds
3. there's not any blood in the cochlea
4. hearing sensory neurons are peripheral nerves
5. prp can heal peripheral nerves

therefore putting concentrated doses of platelets into the cochlea via prp might heal the cochlear wounds.

 

You are attempting to explain his work because he hasn’t done so himself. You shouldn’t need to be doing this. There should be a study confirming its efficacy.

I also don’t understand why there aren’t many more practitioners doing this off the back of his groundbreaking work.

 

how do you know he hasn't explained this????
lolololol you know everything

they do prp all over the world.

 

John, you can’t argue with this, it is fact. You have to take his word for it that it works because he is literally the only one confirming it. This is not a difficult concept to understand and it blows my mind that more people aren’t questioning this after 5 years! It’s embarrassing.

I researched PRP within the first few months of joining this site, so I’ve read quite a lot about it. It’s not the all curing miracle you think it is, but it can have merit in certain applications.

 

you have no idea what I think, or know.

 

You’ve posted many times what you think PRP can do? I’m debating this with you, and so should everybody else if they are seriously considering doing this.

 

So everybody seriously considering doing this should debate me about it?

 

No, lol. Debate and use critical thinking about his methods.

 

Isnt that what we've been doing?

 

I honestly have no idea if it works or not, but it can be like the blind leading the blind on here at times. Everybody needs to take a step back and view this without any emotional attachment.

If this was to fix something that was non-essential in your life, I doubt you’d give this guy a second look. And he may actually be the worlds best ENT surgeon for all I know, but that’s not how he presents himself to the world.

Imagine going for a job interview for a highly qualified position, and when the boss asks about the pioneering breakthrough you talk about in your resume (CV) you say, “yea, I can vouch for that.”The boss would say, “can’t you give me the names and details of some people who can validate your claims”, and you say “there’s no need, I’ve written down what I did here for you. Just take my word for it.” The boss: “so there’s not one person who can tell me this works other than you?”, you say, “there’s no need, I just told you I’ve written it down.”

 

this was from 2014

"After the third and finally the fourth therapy, 4 of 5 patients said that “their smell came back”, while the remaining one patient said that he could smell a lot but not everything."
Anosmia treatment by platelet rich plasma injection
that was from 2016, and verified that prp could restore olfaction.
http://www.tinnitusjournal.com/articles/anosmia-treatment-by-platelet-rich-plasma-injection.html
and this is from the International Tinnitus Journal, sponsored by the ATA.

looks to me like Dr. Minbo is way ahead of the game.

besides, I've posted this study already.

his claim to restore olfaction was validated over two years ago. and it worked really well, almost perfectly in the trial population.

looks like we're the ones logically debating this and you're not even following the discussion or reading the evidence.

 

I honestly can’t believe you’re using this to vouch for Dr Shim. Are you being serious, John? Have you even read that study?

The fact remains that his methods haven’t been clinically tested (with a well designed and controlled study), disseminated, and/or peer-reviewed. He is the only one telling the world what he can do and he seems to be in no rush to have his data confirmed.

This benefits him and not the paying public. Give me one good reason why he shouldn’t have done a study on this 5 years ago (to prove it works)?

 

that was a 2016 clinical human trial, peer reviewed and published in 2016 in the International Tinnitus Journal, which is sponsored by the ATA, stating that PRP was successfully used to regenerating smelling (olfaction).

I posted that to counter your assertion that his methods haven't been independently validated, and they were. At least, his claim to regenerate olfaction.

What isn't serious about that?

 

Ed, if it's efficacious then it benefits both him and the "paying public".
you have absolutely no clue if he's legit or not.

that's your red circle, duder.
you're cracking me up man....

 

You are totalling missing the point, John. How can anyone be expected to make an informed opinion when he hasn’t done a study to prove its efficacy?

It’s a roulette wheel gamble. He should have total conviction in his beliefs and do a proper study on it, and then the outcome should be posted to his website for potential clients to read.

What I find strange is that it’s been said that he’s already done a study, but doesn’t want to publish it, which is in line with the quote I posted earlier in the thread. Why the hell not? Would you buy a car with no history, at face value?

If you were so sure you would have gone already, so the fact remains that even you don’t trust this guy, and let’s be honest, he gives you no reason to trust him. Remember the onus is on him to prove what he can do; not for you to go cherry picking studies trying to convince yourself it will work.

Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t, but he should be doing a much better job of informing people (and putting them at ease) before taking their money.