Toilet Lid Noise and Corticosteroids?

OR just keep on searching for the right ENT who specializes in tinnitus and will be willing to care enough to provide you with a medical help & support. It might take a lot of hits before you find the right one but it's definitely worth it.

This thread reminds me of this thread: https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/protecting-overprotecting-not-protecting.27457/ I have to side with Ed. Generally avoid loud places, keep your hearing protection always at hand, and find what works best for you over time. It is both a physical and psychological damage. You can work on the psychological side (phonophobia, misophonia, hyperacusis, anxiety etc.) and if you get this under control it might be benefical for your perceptiveness of tinnitus too - the volume might decrease. It has been mentioned a numerous times here that a brain plays the key role [cochlea → formatio reticularis (hirnstamm → mesencephalon → talamus → cortex) → the lymbic system]. It all of course comes down to one's luck as well. If you're exposed to a dangerously loud sudden impact noise (firecrackers, gun shots, 1000cc litre bikes revving it up, breaking glassware close to your ears etc.) and you notice ear pain and/or muffled hearing it'd probably be for the best to consult this with a medical professional you trust. I usually do this by directly emailing them or calling them on a phone when they're on duty, which brings me to my point No.: 1 find a doctor you trust and who cares.

As for the corticosteroids, they are ototoxic and have many bad side effects. Most of it has already been discussed here. I'll just add this site as a point of reference http://www.pdr.net/ to find out more about drugs adverse reactions. It is the reason I set up this thread to find a safe workabout:
https://www.tinnitustalk.com/threads/natural-safe-alternatives-to-anti-inflammatory-steroids.28390/

I recommend getting this publication too (lots of helpful advice): McKenna, L., Baguley, D. and McFerran, D. (2011). Living with Tinnitus and Hyperacusis. London: SPCK, ISBN: 1847090834

P.S.: I attach 'the absolute threshold of hearing graph' with some illustrations that might give a better idea what we are exposed to in everyday life situations (130 dB(A) - pain).

Cheers.

 

I agree to an extent. Care needs to be taken to not discourage people from seeking medical help, which may or may not mean being prescribed prednisolone/prednisone. A doctor should ascertain what, if any, treatment is required. Knowledge is power and that’s why this forum is important. Not knowing and doing nothing means possibly losing a portion of hearing that could otherwise have potentially been saved.

In my own experience it is not that easy to get and certainly not in large amounts.
It is an important drug for various conditions, but it’s also on the list of ototoxic medications. So if you really need it, you need it and only a doctor can tell you if that’s the case, but be careful.

 

True. I could only get 50mg total each time. So I had to take tapering doses far under the typical dose for acoustic trauma. I know I said previously I believe I did not end up needing it due to my issues being middle ear temporary conductive loss due to muscle contractions, not sensorineural cochlea related. But maybe had I taken the proper amount I may have avoided my currrent ASD situation. Who knows? I’m not a professional and it’s too late now anyway. The doctor advised caution so only prescribed very little, but had initially wanted to wait 72hours before even doing anything.

Another doctor I saw who has T carries prednisolone wherever she goes. Not just the tiny amount the other doctor gave me. A box full.

 

So you derive a general rule from your own experience with a sample of one. It's called hasty generalization, and it's not the first time I point this cognitive bias to you. Clearly there's a permeability issue in the learning process, and no-one but you can do anything about it. Perhaps your passion or your pain is taking away the cartesian traits from your reasoning process.

BTW, it's not clear that giving you an extension of your prescription was the right thing to do. It is only per your own non-doctor perspective, so it's quite possible that in the one example you provide, "the doc did the right thing".

As for the rest of your lengthy post, you make good points, that I agree with for the most part. I often tell people that nobody has their best interest as their top priority but themselves. I encourage everyone to get educated and consider doctors as consultants on your health team, because it really is a team: they know stuff you don't, and you know stuff they don't, but you should have the last word on go/no-go for treatments. You can try to fool them by feeding them false information about the part they don't know, but don't expect that it will yield a better outcome because you have more control over it: you'll be missing out on a lot of important knowledge that you've deliberately chosen to work around, and that can lead to dangerous (even deadly) outcomes.

Instead, and recognizing some truth to your statement that doctors often don't know about specifics of our cases, I suggest you find a doctor who is willing to work with you. Granted this isn't particularly easy. I have found one (my neurogologist who did my surgery) who works with me this way: when I get to my appointment, I have my laptop ready with an agenda for all the points I want to talk to him about (I prepare well in advance, as his time is limited and I need to make the best of it). Some of these will contain research papers and results from experimental treatments. We go down the list and I educate him on some bleeding edge treatments and he tells me what he thinks about it, and whether it's worth a try or could be too dangerous. At the end of the session, I've gone through all my agenda items and we have a plan on what to do next.

I side with you in encouraging the patients to drive, but I think your methods are often counterproductive.

 

Not even remotely close.

Also, see the results of my recent poll here about people's satisfaction with their ENTs.

 

Given the lack of rigor in the crafting of the survey, I take those results for the value they have, which is quite infinitesimal.

 

I lol'ed

Not about the truth behind it. Mainly I never thought I would see this reference in a Tinnitus Forum. heh

 

Are you mixing this up with that cancer survey? Otherwise, what would a survey crafted the right way look like?

The width of the confidence interval might be somewhat large, but given that the results indicate that only one tenth of the respondents think their ENT was more helpful than the people on this forum, it is unlikely that the majority are happy with their ENT. In other words, if the majority are happy with their ENT, the chance of getting a survey of over 40 people return a result that only 10% are happy with their ENT is infinitesimally small.

 

No they're both poorly crafted.

That's not even close to the top problem with those surveys.
Here's one of the problems with your ENT vs forum survey (I won't give you all the ones I can think of because it'll take too long: follow a course on survey designs to learn best practices): the number of choices. It's got only 3 choices, but 2 choices essentially get funneled to the same outcome bucket. From a pure real estate standpoint, the option you want to win already has 66% of the real estate, which means that if you had given the survey to monkeys who picked randomly, you'd already be able to "make your point" and derive your conclusion (from a uniform random pick, no less).

There's many more problems of course, which don't even related to the sampling of the participants (that would be a whole different topic).

 

Also what about the 90 percent of people for whom the advice of “there’s nothing you can do, ignore it and move on” worked for? I mean it’s worked more often than any other intervention.

 

You are basically saying that if someone had a good ENT experience, I could get that person to answer that he or she had a horrible experience by playing with the number of options in my survey. If the majority had a good experience, about half of them would have to somehow get so confused by the poll so as to report the opposite of their beliefs (for us to get that "90%" result).

 

There is nothing wrong with THAT advice (seeing how there are no treatments). The problem is them not explaining to these T patients that their ears are now more vulnerable, and their lifestyles have to be adjusted, or else. My ENT actually did tell me to protect my ears in order to maximize my chance of recovery.

 

But science hasn’t determined that. That is simply not true. No matter what poll you create. The only measure of truth is if you have hearing loss and you are trying to prevent more hearing loss. Outside of that situation, science has shown decreasing marginal impact and that actually what you are saying is totally wrong. Want to know why peoples T spikes when they here a loud noise? Because you tell them it will.

 

Link?

People have been reporting spikes due to minor noises long before February 2016 (when I got T).

 

How do you know?

 

The same issues have been pointed out multiple times. If you don't understand by now, there's really no point in explaining it again.

This isn't about confidence intervals.

The majority of people who responded to the poll, sure. The poll doesn't provide useful information on any other group.

 

Actually, it IS about confidence intervals. None of the minor issues that you had pointed out would cause a confidence interval to be so wide that a population proportion that is over 50% would generate a sample proportion of less than 10% with sample size of 40.

The population that this poll deals with might not be all T sufferers. As I pointed out multiple times, the population the poll deals with are all of the people who made an account here, which is all of us. If we could choose which population we want to study, we would want to study the subpopulation that we are part of.

 

You wish.

 

Once again I agree with you Greg. I was not trying to argue against the usefulness of the ENTs. I just wanted to stress that the way this poll is set is not very fair for them. Just my opinion.

 

I posted the link a few days ago in another thread. Maybe it was this one.

I thought you knew that correlation and causation are different? If you don't then you really shouldn't be using any stats at all.

 

You posted a link to a study looking for a link between taking steroids and cancer. You also posted a link to a study about the effectiveness of drugs after their expiration date. That's all.

This would be relevant for studies that ask their subjects "have you been having spikes?" and "have you been exposed to noise?"

For the observations that I used to back up my claims, the story is usually "the subject gets exposed to noise and within minutes or hours he or she gets a spike that lasts a considerable time." By trying to argue that there is no causation in that context, you are just showing how you are reduced to grasping at straws.

 

I meant the thread, not you.

 

You're right. I am trying to grasp at straws. I haven't had this much trouble trying to teach statistics to someone. I am really trying to explain this so you understand.

First, your observations are inherently biased and thus, can't be used.

Secondly, in an observational study, evidence for causality is increased and required by including relevant covariates, of which you have provided none. Your theories and stats is something akin to: it gets dark after it gets light, therefore, based on my observational evidence of 1000 days, surely the night time causes the day time. About 4000 years ago, I think we had moved past that point. Eventually we learned that even though there was a perfect correlation between the passing of night and the arrival of day, there was a third party involved that caused this all to happen.

 

Agreed, and the bolded words above are a nice euphemism!

 

I would love for a someone on TT who is philosophically inclined to write a foucauldian discourse analysis on this thread.

 

Yes, when correlation is mistaken for causation, what happens is that there is a third variable that causes both of them. The number of fire fighters called to the scene does not cause the fire damage, even though when one is high so is the other, and when one is low so is the other. In that case, the third variable is the size of the fire. So what third variable could possibly cause both the loud noise And a spike in T?

 

You know, there's a reason why there's real science behind crafting surveys.

I wrote that I had described one of the flaws among many. It's not that one thing that does everything. It's that each little thing works in its own way to bias the result towards your intended goal.

Check out http://jeannecope.com/36-bad-survey...rveys-27-638-cb-entire-icon-examples-of-poor/ for more examples, and as you browse, try to see where you fell short. The link above mentions "the question is leading", which you've also fallen for, but it is a gallery of examples that you can peruse (if you click on the thumbnails).

Did you know that for general product/service reviews, the bias is overwhelmingly negative? That's because the expectation is that a product/service is going to do what it's supposed to do flawlessly. So when it works, we don't think anything of it, it's "normal". When it doesn't meet our expectation, that's when we start raising hell and leave negative reviews.

 

Stress. And you can't just throw up a poll and say "were you stressed at the time of T spike". Stress is too complex of an issue, many people may not even be aware of their stress until they actually experience a period with out.