Still Go Clubbing or to Bars or Go Rave at Music Festivals?

Do you guys still go to clubs and bars and other loud fancy places after having tinnitus? I still go to bars and some loud places with my friends 'cause I don't need to get away from them because of my tinnitus. I wear sponge earplugs when I feel like the noise is irritating for me or it's too loud for my ears. (Recently got back from the bar lol and I wore sponge earplugs the whole time.)

I really love going to music festivals but I got this tinnitus after getting too close to the soundbox at my second time going to such festivals. I really want to go there though even I have this tinnitus in my ears. Lol. My friends want me to go with them but I refuse to go many times, I don't want my ears suffer more. Now I'm getting used to the tinnitus so it doesn't bother me anymore. And I don't want to go through anxiety and depression after getting exposed to loud noise anymore though. But still... I still want to go music festivals lol, though I know health comes first

 

Like everything else in life, you have to weigh your decisions versus the potential consequences.

 

Don't do it even if you feel it's not too loud,sadly what we think is right at the time later turns out to be wrong in the future and once it does,there's no going back.

 

Don't I know it

 

No.

 

Nope.

Don't think about stuff you can't do. Think about stuff you can.

 

Yeah

yeah sadly...

 

Yep! I'm working on it

 

There are many, many things you can do, lately ive been having lots of fun with friends.
and you can too

 

Invest in a pair of custom musician ear plugs..the best gift you can get urself. I would also suggest taking breaks after a certain amount of time at these shows or bars especially if the bass is very loud.

 

No, but I still listen to music at a low volume.

 

Pubs and bars yes. Not been to any clubs or gigs for a long time.

 

I know this is a old thread, but I saw it at the ''similar threads''.

Why do people think you can't go out when you wear good earplugs?

I don't go out because I am too afraid to make my T worse (but it the futer I may try it more often), but I wonder why people here say you just can't. When you wear custom made earplugs (for examle -25 db) and you don't go to the insanly loud places, you are exposed to maybe 80 Db and maybe even less. When you stay for 1-2 hours and you take a break after 1 hour, how is it possible to make your T worse? I know cases where this happened (not in real life, only online).

I know people in real life with T who go out without earplugs and only one said that her T got worse.

I don't say that you just should go out and your T will not get worse, I am just wondering how it is possible to make you T worse if you wear good earplugs.

 

Right.

 

Our ears have been compromised. The noises that healthy people won't even notice can cause permanent T spikes for T sufferers.

To answer your question - the best earplugs can only give you an NRR of a little over 30 dB. Many people on this forum found out the hard way that sometimes this is not enough - see the link below
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/wearing-foam-ear-plugs-on-a-roller-coaster.22559/#post-259198

Literally every week (every day?) there are posts on this forum where the author is in agony caused by a spike that they got after attending a moderately loud events while wearing ear protection. It makes sense to learn from the mistakes made by others.

Keep in mind that some people attend loud events and don't have any change in their T. First of all, it is possible that their T would have faded had they not attended those events. Second of all, we don't know whether by attending those events, those people are setting themselves up for a permanent spike later on in their life. In my opinion, it makes sense to do everything we can to ensure that we had minimized the risk of our T getting louder.

 

Is the risk really worth it?!

 

@Bill Bauer

There are hundreds of musicians that still play music in loud settings and have no issues...i'm not saying for him or her to not use caution.. but you can't live life as a hermit. I still continue to do the things I want to do which includes going to loud places such as weddings. The first wedding I want to I did have a set back but had no lingering issues after the event. I then tried again a month later and had no problems.

 

First of all, are you talking about musicians who already have T? There are hundreds of thousands of musicians out there in the world, and a considerable fraction of them have T. So that "hundreds" figure is meaningless. What we need to know is the fraction of musicians who end up having problems.

According to the poll below
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/thread...the-onset-of-tinnitus-and-regretted-it.23061/
one third of people who had attended a loud event ended up with a permanent spike. I am not saying that this is the actual probability of ending up with a permanent spike. I am saying that given those values, the probability of getting a permanent spike after a loud event (and the links in my earlier post indicate that earplugs are often not effective enough to protect one from a permanent spike) is likely 5% or higher. (Also keep in mind the point I made in my other post - just because you were not hurt this time, doesn't mean damage wasn't done to your ears - your T might not fade now, or you might now be more likely to develop louder T in the future.) It seems to me that no pleasure is worth a 5% risk of getting a permanently louder T for the rest of one's life.

 

5% is an extremely small number bill...im not going to say anything more...im srry i didnt look up an exact number on how many musicians have T but many of them do have it and continue to play on. As long as the bass isnt up high you should be fine at loud events.

 

One round of a game of Russian Roulette gives you 1/6 = 16.67% probability of being shot in the head. Screaming T (as a result of you knowingly taking a risk) for the rest of your life seems to be a fate worse than death, by far. In any case, would you play a round of the game of Russian Roulette to get concert tickets if the probability of the gun firing were to be only 1%?!

Would you risk being burned alive if the upside were concert tickets and the downside had only a 5% chance of occurring?

 

I went to a bunch of concerts and a festival after getting tinnitus. Back then I didn't know it was something that could get worse so I didn't think anything of it. It was only when i came here abd read the horror stories that it put me off going.

 

For some people it's fine, for some people it's not and their tinnitus gets much worse. You won't find out until you try it if you dare to do it at all. For me personally it did not make it worse (I only went to bars with no music and the occasional 30 mins or so in a bar with music), But I ALWAYS wore very good ear protection. I would advice you to get some musicians custom made.

 

After getting T, it turns out several people in my life have T (and lucky for them, no H). Three friends my age have them -- they're all musicians and still do a lot of gigs like weddings and small pubs (with molded ear plugs of course). My dad, mom, two uncles, aunt, and sister's father-in-law have T for years and they're all like, "Oh, so that's tinnitus?" They travel a lot, and my dad, two uncles, and sister's father-in-law love to play musical instruments -- sometimes even together.

Ear conditions are weird. Some have it bad, some don't. So it's up to the person to do calculated risks for their lives instead of locking themselves up like a hermit and spiraling down into depression. Personally, I don't anymore but it's because I have H. If I have only T, I'd definitely try to live a little more.

 

Says the guy who bases his "our ears have been compromised" statement on one poll and some threads of a board representing a small portion of T sufferers

 

And wears ear muffs when he does washing up.

 

Yes and yes.

 

If one has tinnitus this includes "noise induced" after a person has habituated. There is nothing wrong in going out and having a good time at: clubs, cinema and concerts. Providing a person is sensible and doesn't overdo things. Please click on the links below to see what I mean.

Michael

https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/tinnitus-earplugs-and-nightclubs.18059/

https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/hyperacusis-as-i-see-it.19174/

 

Stats is not my field, but I had published papers in stats journals. You didn't pay attention to the following text in my message:

It is a relatively small sample with only 24 observations (there is a total of 32 observations there, but 8 people haven't attended loud events, so they don't count). You will be surprised to find out that statisticians would refer to a sample with 30 or more observations as a "large sample:"
"...at least when large samples are used, such as N ≥ 30."

We are trying to estimate population proportion. Condition 3 on page 106 of
https://projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.ss/1009213286
states that confidence intervals may be used if n*p_hat>5, where p_hat is the sample proportion (in our case the proportion in our sample who got a permanent spike). According to the paper above, condition 3 is a statement that can be found in some popular stats textbooks. In our case n*p_hat = 24*8/24 = 8>5. The paper goes on to critisize this condition. I will come back to their critique momentarily. If that condition 3 is true, then we can use the confidence interval calculators on
http://www.sample-size.net/confidence-interval-proportion/
I set N = 24, x = 8, and CL = 99. I am looking for a 99% confidence interval. The online calculator is providing us with two sets of confidence intervals. One is
Lower bound = 0.119
Upper bound = 0.614
The other one is
Lower bound = P - (Zα*SEM) = 0.085
Upper bound = P + (Zα*SEM) = 0.581
The above are 99% confidence intervals. For an interpretation of the meaning of a confidence interval, see
http://www.mathbootcamps.com/interpreting-confidence-intervals/
To paraphrase, we are 99% confident that the fraction of tinnitus sufferers who will get a permanent spike after attending a loud event is between 8.5% and 58% (I am using the second interval we computed above). This statement takes the sample size into account. As a result of that relatively small sample size, we ended up with a 99% confidence interval that is wider.

[What follows will be of interest to people who took a "baby stats" university course where you learned to use a confidence interval for the population proportion whenever np>5 and nq>5.

Now, if we want to be as conservative as possible, we will look at Figure 4 on https://projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.ss/1009213286
It gives us "Coverage of the nominal 99% standard interval for fixed
n=20 and variable p". Here, "coverage" means the true confidence of the confidence interval, when you use the formula for a 99% confidence interval. You will see that when the true population proportion p is larger than about 17%, the confidence is not 99%, it is actually somewhere between 89% and 98%. When the true p is between about 10% and 17%, the confidence can get as low as 88%. Note that this is true when the sample size is 20. Our sample size is 24. To be conservative, we can conclude that we are 90% confident that the fraction of tinnitus sufferers who will get a permanent spike after attending a loud event is between 8.5% and 58%.]

You will notice that in my post, I was very conservative - I assumed that my poll implied a probability of 5%. We can be 90%-99% sure that it is actually above 8.5%. Note that 58% is inside of our 99% confidence interval. Taking into account the sample size, we can be 90%-99% sure that given the results of this poll, the probability of getting a permanent spike might be as high as 58%.

We are a subset of T sufferers who are bothered by T enough to register for this forum. This means that whoever is reading the thread with that poll is part of the population the poll is trying to study. In other words, that confidence interval might not apply to a randomly selected T sufferer, but it applies to YOU.

 

Fake news!

 

Bill, your "stat analysis" is completely biased from the beginning since the respondents of your poll each have their own definition of "loud event". If you want to make serious analyses, it's important to at least define accurately the terms you use in the poll you will base the analyses on.

Please leave rocket science to rocket scientists