Hearing Loss Help  

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A lady wrote:

I highly recommend ordering hearing aid batteries from http://www.hearingaidbattery.org. Free shipping and great prices on batteries! I’ve been ordering mine from there for years. So much less expensive than any drug store or audiologist.

I can’t say these are the best prices for hearing aid batteries I’ve seen, but they are good prices. One thing for sure is that these batteries are fresh! I can’t complain about the free shipping either.

Does anyone have a better source for quality hearing aid batteries they’d like to share?

 by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A lady asked,

Can you direct me to some good sources to read about cochlear implants?

To learn first-hand about cochlear implants and to get many of your questions answered, the nicest (friendly, no brand wars) on-line group for cochlear implants is the one in the SayWhatClub. Ask to join the CI list.

In addition, I’d go to the 3 main cochlear implant manufacturers web sites. They are:

Advanced Bionics

Cochlear Americas

Med-El US

 by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A lady asked:

Millions of people experience stress. Some people end up with tinnitus because of stress, others don’t. Why? I believe I developed tinnitus from stress. It is the only logical answer I can come up with because I wasn’t taking any medication, and my hearing is perfect. I haven’t been exposed to loud noise. It just happened out of blue one afternoon. The tinnitus began in my right ear and has never stopped. The only thing that I can figure out is that I was under a lot of work-related stress at that time. I have since eliminated the work stress. Since I am self-employed, I stopped accepting work that was causing the stress and reduced my work to part time so I no longer feel work stress at all.

Why then doesn’t the tinnitus clear? I have habituated to my tinnitus. I read your book several times and I also did Tinnitus Retraining Therapy (TRT), counseling and used table-top sound generators. I am fine now in that I can live with my tinnitus, and it is no longer intrusive for me. However, I am just really curious about it. So much about it doesn’t make sense to me.

A certain amount of stress is good for us. It gets us out of bed in the morning for example. But too much stress is just too much. Some people know how to handle stress. Others don’t. Probably those that can effectively handle stress aren’t very susceptible to tinnitus. But those that can’t handle stress more often notice their tinnitus, and as they focus on it, it becomes more and more intrusive.

Depression can also bring on tinnitus. Studies have shown that depressed people typically have a higher incidence of tinnitus than people who are not depressed. Also, the tinnitus is louder and more intrusive in depressed people than in people who are not depressed.

Another thing about tinnitus that confuses people is that tinnitus is not one single “thing”—but is really a number of different things that all produce phantom tinnitus-like sounds. Thus, one treatment doesn’t fix everything. For example, tinnitus caused by a constriction in an artery in your neck (pulsatile tinnitus) is not going to respond to the same treatment you need for tinnitus caused by noise, or tinnitus caused from taking drugs, or tinnitus caused by stress or depression. Each of these needs specific treatment related to the cause. Since it is a complex subject, there is no one easy answer that makes sense in all cases.

 by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A lady wrote:

My hearing has decreased considerably these past few years. I ordered your “Seeing and Hearing Speech” CD recently to help me understand conversations better. I have been trying to read peoples’ lips for some time now and the lessons are helping, although I am still on the vowels.

Personally, I’d start with the easier consonants, then go to the harder consonants and finally to the vowels—or do some of each. That way you will seem to progress faster. The consonants are typically easier to speechread as you watch for the movement of the lips and jaw. Vowels have no movement in themselves. They are formed by the shape of the mouth.

This lady continues: “I feel I make who ever I am listening to uncomfortable because I avoid eye contact in trying to read their lips.”

You should be looking at both the speaker’s eyes and mouth when you are speechreading. Don’t just focus on the mouth. You get a lot of information from the eyes too. In fact, I have a lot of difficulty speechreading people when they are wearing sunglasses. So do other speechreaders I’ve talked to. My solution? As funny as it sounds, I ask them to take off their sunglasses so I can hear them better!

You can learn more about speechreading in my article on “Speechreading” and more about the “Seeing and Hearing Speech” CD program by clicking on the above links.

 by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

The lead paragraph in the article Don’t be a silent victim of a drug’s side effects (1) begins:

I just read a new poll in Consumer Reports Magazine that reveals that one in six Americans who have ever taken a prescription drug experienced a side effect that was serious enough to send them to the hospital! One in six! Considering the percentage of people in this country who are on some form of daily prescription medication (remember, it’s over 50 percent now), this is a stunning statistic. That’s 16 percent of the people who’ve ever taken a prescription medicine!

Since there are around 300 million people in the USA, and since probably 90% or more of the population have taken a prescription drug at some time in their lives, that works out to around 45 million people in the USA that have been hospitalized by serious side effects of prescription drugs!

Remember, this is only the “serious” side effects. Added to this are all the side effects that were not considered serious enough to go to the hospital. These side effects include many of the ototoxic side effects people also experience.

Thus, it appears that taking drugs ultimately may do more harm to your body than good. Therefore, before you take any drugs, make your doctor justify to you how the supposed benefits will far outweigh the negative side effects. Otherwise, you’ll just be exchanging one problem for another.

If you want to protect your ears (and the rest of your body) from the side effects of drugs, you might want to do what I do. First seek out alternative treatments before you hit the drugs.

So far, alternative treatments have worked for me. (I don’t take so much as even an aspirin.) Maybe alternative medicine will work for you too. In any case, your ears will love you for it.

(1) The W. C. Douglass newsletter “Healthier News”, Mon. June 2, 2008

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

The organization, DeafLink, is offering its new “Accessible Hazard Alert System—Individual Notification (AHAS)”, which is a new service for deaf, hard of hearing, late-deafened, deaf-blind and blind individuals in the USA. It can send emergency information for your city, county or state to email addresses, pagers, and cell phones with text capability, and to PDAs with email capability. The real beauty of this system is that you can request the information alerts in many forms—i.e. ASL, English text, voice, and Braille—as long as you have the appropriate receiving device for your desired mode of communication. For more information and the registration form, click on the above link.

 by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A man explained:

I found an interesting effect with my induction loop system. Seems if you turn up an electric guitar, the sound from the induction loop gets picked up by the guitar pickups and broadcast through the guitar amplifier. Ever heard of this before?

Yes, you are not the only one to discover this phenomenon. It can be a problem when you loop the platform of a church or auditorium and then want to use an electric guitar up there. The electric guitar pickups are basically t-coils so they pick up the varying magnetic field from the loop system if they are close enough to it, just like the t-coils on your hearing aids do.

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A lady wrote:

I have tried several different brands of hearing aids over a period of years. These are high-cost name brands, but none are helpful because they make my tinnitus worse to the point of giving me an ear ache. My hearing is declining so much that I’m hoping that some type of hearing aid is recommended that would help. I have had tinnitus and recruitment for over 25 years. Can you advise on any hearing aid with enough compression built in that might help?

Some people need to limit the volume of sounds they hear via their hearing aids to a given level in order to keep their tinnitus and recruitment under control. Sounds above that threshold level make their tinnitus louder, and their recruitment kicks in and hurts. This seems to be the case with you.

The way to get around this is to instruct your audiologist to set the maximum power to a level just below where your tinnitus begins to get louder. Actually, your audiologist needs to set the maximum output and compression for each frequency (channel). You may find that your tinnitus and/or recruitment only reacts to louder sounds at certain frequencies—so you need to identify those particular frequencies and have the power and compression set appropriately.

Your audiologist may balk at this because she will tell you that you need more amplification. She will be right (as far as it goes)—but in your case amplification isn’t the only consideration. You also need to avoid aggravating your tinnitus (and recruitment), so you may choose to give up hearing optimally in order to keep your tinnitus under control.

Thus, you have a choice—hear well and have loud tinnitus (and recruitment), or hear “less well” to some degree but not aggravate your tinnitus (or recruitment). (I’ve had to do this myself.) Since it is your ears, that is YOUR choice to make. You are the boss—so tell you audiologist to adjust your aids the way you want, or find someone who will.

 by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

On February 17, 2009 all analog TV transmissions in the USA will cease. If you have an analog TV (not digital) and use an antenna (not cable), then your TV will go blank on February 17.

What you need is a digital-to-analog converter box. You can get two government coupons (worth $40.00 each) to help you pay for this box (or boxes).

Furthermore, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has created some fact sheets to help you set up your new converter boxes.

You can download an illustrated basic fact sheet entitled “Setting Up Your Digital-to-Analog Converter Box (Basic)“.

A 3- page illustrated, more advanced fact sheet, “Setting Up Your Digital-to- Analog Converter Box With a VCR” shows you how to hook up your converter box, VCR and TV so you can watch and record one channel, or watch one channel and record a second channel at the same time. (This second method requires two converter boxes, so even if you only have one analog TV, you still might want to get two converter boxes.)

You can find a wealth of information on the digital change-over, how it might affect you, and what you need to do about it at http://www.dtv.gov and at https://www.dtv2009.gov.

Throughout this whole transition process, make sure that you can get your closed captions. It’s easy to overlook this critical element until the last. You don’t want to purchase everything and set it all up, and then discover you can’t get your captions to work! Check that your captions are working properly every step of the way. (See our two previous articles on this subject, “Captioning Problems—Avoiding the HDMI Cable Fiasco” and “Getting Captions On Your New TV—The Good, the Bad and the Downright Frustrating“.)

 by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A lady wrote: 

Regarding the person who wrote that she took Paxil and then noticed hearing loss, tinnitus and balance problems 3 months after stopping this drug—wouldn’t it be logical to go back on this medication since she didn’t have these problems while taking it?

I don’t understand why some people who have taken Paxil for extended periods don’t end up with any ototoxic symptoms and others do? And if it is the ototoxic drug causing the symptom—such as possible tinnitus—then why doesn’t tinnitus clear up after ending the use of the ototoxic drug?

If the various noted drugs are ototoxic, why isn’t everyone affected by them? There are millions of people on antidepressant and anti-hypertension medications etc., and not all of them end up with ‘ear’ problems? Only a percentage of them. Why?

You have asked a number of excellent questions regarding ototoxicity. Let’s take a look at each of them in turn.

First, you ask, “Wouldn’t it be logical to go back on this medication; since she didn’t have these problems while taking this medication?”

It might seem that way, but what we don’t know in this particular case is whether the drug was slowly affecting her ears, but she wasn’t aware of it until 3 months after she had stopped the drug. Since Paxil affects your perceptions, you might not worry about those symptoms while on this drug, and only really become aware of them after you stop taking it. Also, remember that all drugs have side effects, and these are not doing your body any good in the long term, so it is better to get off any drugs you can for your overall body health.

Second question: “I don’t understand why some people who have taken Paxil for extended use don’t end up with any ototoxic symptoms and others do?

The short answer is that everyone is different. so it should not be any surprise that we can have different reactions to any given drug. That is why one person might have balance problems, another person have hearing loss and a third person no obvious side effects from taking the same drug. (Doesn’t seem fair, does it?)

Furthermore, some drugs have ototoxic side effects that seem to only affect a small percentage of the people taking them, and other drugs have ototoxic side effects that seem to affect a much higher percentage of those taking them. That’s just the way it is. Perhaps some day researchers will discover the various factors that determine whether a given person will be susceptible to ototoxic side effects or not. Until then, I warn everyone because no one can say exactly who is going to get any given ototoxic side effect, or none at all, and if they do experience an ototoxic side effect, whether it will affect them severely or just mildly, or whether it will be temporary or permanent.

Third question: “If it is the ototoxic drug causing the symptom—such as tinnitus—then why doesn’t the tinnitus clear up after ending the use of the ototoxic drug?”

For some drugs, when you cease taking it, in maybe 2 weeks or so the tinnitus goes away. For other drugs, it turns on the tinnitus, but it apparently forgets to turn off the tinnitus switch when it leaves. There are a number of factors that may be involved.

For example, your brain is “plastic” and grows new connections between various parts. If taking a certain drug causes new tinnitus connections to be made, stopping taking that drug doesn’t automatically destroy those connections, thus the tinnitus may remain.

Think of it more like a flood causing a river channel to permanently change and carve out a new channel. You ask, “Why doesn’t the river go back to the old channel when the flood is over?” The answer is that it now has a new channel that “works” so there is no reason to change back. In some people, this is how tinnitus seems to operate. It makes new connections in the brain. In order to get rid of the tinnitus, you have to make your brain quit using the new channels it has carved out and revert back to the old non tinnitus channels.

Furthermore, if a given drug causes tinnitus, and if you tend to suffer from depression, you may focus on that new tinnitus sound. Your limbic (emotional) system then flags it as being “important”, and thus it becomes even louder and more intrusive. The result is that now your tinnitus is much harder to get rid of, ever after you stop taking the drug that caused it in the first place.

Tinnitus is not a simple condition and there are likely many factors that determine whether it will be with you temporarily while you are on the drug (aspirin is one such drug), or whether it will be with you permanently.

Fourth question: “If the various noted drugs are ototoxic, why isn’t everyone affected by them? There are millions of people on antidepressant and anti-hypertension medications etc., and not all of them end up with ‘ear’ problems? Only a percentage of them. Why?

There are many factors—it could be genetics, body chemistry, environmental factors, etc.

For example, people with a particular genetic mutation are very susceptible to the ototoxic side effects of Aminoglycoside antibiotics. People that do not have this specific genetic defect are typically not so susceptible.

Furthermore, some drugs act synergistically with other agents. Thus, taking a given drug with no other factors involved may not produce any ototoxic side effects, but in the presence of one of these factors, all of a sudden there is the hearing loss (or whatever).

For example, some drugs cause noticeable ototoxic side effects if you also smoke or are around smokers. Other drugs cause noticeable ototoxic side effects if you are in the presence of various chemicals (typically industrial solvents) such as you might find in manufacturing plants. Still other drugs wreak much of their ototoxic havoc in the presence of noise.

You have asked a number of questions for which no definitive answers are known at the present. Thus, we are working with very incomplete information regarding ototoxicity. I sure wish we knew much more about the ototoxicity of the various drugs.

Much of what I know about drug ototoxicity is contained in my book “Ototoxic Drugs Exposed“. This book contains information on the ototoxicity of 763 drugs known to damage ears (and information on 148 ototoxic chemicals too).