Hearing Loss Help  

 by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.
A man wrote:

I was browsing on a website and want to know whether what it said about sound therapy is true. The website said that:

‘The Sound Therapy Program is a rehabilitation of the inner ear muscles, thanks to high frequencies.

It can help in all ear disorders as:
· Hearing loss
· Tinnitus
· Meniere’s disease, vertigo and dizziness
· Cocktail party syndrome (difficulty hearing in noisy places)
· Noise sensibility (hyperacusis)
· Short term memory loss
· Language disorders (dyslexia, stuttering)
· Learning (ADD, ADHD, autism, Down’s syndrome)
· Sleep disorders
· Brain damage (accident, stroke, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s)’

The above “blurb” came from near the bottom of this web page. It’s quite an impressive list of conditions that sound therapy is supposed to cure, isn’t it?

You are right to be cautious, and want to know whether it is real, or just a bunch of hype.

I’m not an expert in sound therapy, but I have investigated and written about it in the past, and even have the sound therapy tapes myself so I know a bit about it.

First, let me say that the above blurb is somewhat misleading (just like much of the advertising today is). Yes, sound therapy does work for all those conditions to some degree or other for some people, but no, is is not the cure for all those conditions for everyone.

If sound therapy did indeed work for everyone and cure hearing loss or tinnitus, then everyone would be using it, As a result, no one would need hearing aids or have tinnitus anymore—and we know that is not true. Thus, you have to
understand what sound therapy realistically can and cannot do for you.

Sound therapy is indeed a valid treatment for certain conditions, especially for children with learning disabilities, ADD, autism and related conditions. In fact, this is where sound therapy excels.

One lady just wrote me and stated, “I have seen incredible results in all 3 of my children with special needs from listening [to sound therapy music using an] 80 GB iPod with bone conduction headphones.”

This lady is now herself a sound therapy practitioner. When I asked her how it had helped her tinnitus, she told me that although she had been using sound therapy on herself for the past 9 months, she hadn’t seen any difference in her tinnitus. This reinforces my point that sound therapy does not work for everyone, not even for some firm believers in the program. On the other hand, it does work miracles for some people. Thus, you really can’t know if it will work for you unless you try it.

I found, that with my particular reverse slope hearing loss, listening to the tapes grated on my nerves, so this therapy isn’t for me either.

In general, for the average person with conditions such as hearing loss, hyperacusis, tinnitus and Meniere’s disease, I don’t think sound therapy by itself has a very high success rate. However, if you have certain particular variations of the above conditions, for example, certain conductive hearing losses rather than sensorineural hearing losses, then sound therapy can do amazing things.

Sound therapy is simple to use. It consists of listening to special tapes/CDs/iPods of classical music that have been specially electronically altered to give your ears a “workout”. You can listen while you are working or relaxing.

Sound therapy was developed by French ENT, Dr. Alfred Tomatis in the early 1970s, so it has been around for about 40 years.

Another doctor, Guy Berard made some modifications to the sound therapy program and called it “Auditory Integration Training”. He brought this program to the USA in 1992.

The mother and daughter team of Patricia and Rafaele Joudry made yet another variation to the sound therapy program and explain it in their book, “Sound Therapy: Music to Recharge Your Brain”. It explains how to listen, and what benefits you can expect for conditions such as tinnitus, fatigue, insomnia, stress and anxiety, hearing loss, sound sensitivity (hyperacusis), dizziness, Meniere’s syndrome, jet lag and learning, memory and concentration problems.

Rafaele also authored, “Triumph over Tinnitus”. This book explains sound therapy’s role in helping people with tinnitus. You can get these books through her Sound Therapy International website.

Sound therapy is one of the many tools you should have in your “ear repair” toolbox, and take it out and use it when appropriate. If it works for you, great. If not, put in back in your toolbox and try another “tool”.

You can read more about Sound Therapy, Auditory Integration Training and Biomental Home-Retraining Therapy and how they specifically apply to tinnitus in my book, “When Your Ears Ring! Cope With Your Tinnitus—Here’s How“.

If you have tried sound therapy or one of its variations, I’d love to hear how it worked for you.

 by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A college student asked:

What is the best method to hear the comments going back and forth between the professor and the students in a college class? Do you know of a digital recorder that can be paired with an audio transmitter/receiver loop system? Would this work for listening later?

It’s easy enough to record what goes on in a classroom, but whether you will be able to understand the speech later is quite another thing. The quality of recordings are dependent on how close the microphone is to the person speaking at any given time. If the professor and students always speak directly into microphones, then this could be an effective method. However, in practice, passing microphones around in classrooms becomes cumbersome and slows down conversations and thus seldom works.

You could put an FM microphone on the professor and hear everything he/she says, which is great as far as it goes, but its catching what the student’s say that is so hard.

Furthermore, if you have less than perfect discrimination, you’ll find that you won’t understand a lot of what is recorded anyway. Therefore, personally, I wouldn’t use such a system since I have problems with discrimination.

Second, again depending on your hearing and discrimination you could try a PockeTalker and directional microphone. This can work quite well, but you have to know who is talking next so you can aim the microphone at the right person, or you will miss all the short comments. Furthermore, aiming the microphone and trying to take notes at the same time is not easy. This method would work better in small classes, especially if you were all sitting in a circle, not in large classrooms where some of the students are quite a distance from you.

For this method, I’d use a PockeTalker and the super-directional handheld microphone.

Third, and I’ve saved the best for last, is to have real time captioning (CART). Not only do you “hear” everything then, you also have a complete transcript of what was said and can make notes from it later.

There are two “versions” of real time captioning. One is where the captionist is right there in the classroom with you. The other is called “remote CART” where you are connected to the captionist via the internet.

I’ve used both CART and remote CART a good number of times and love using it.

 by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A man wrote:

My 87 year old mother has of late begun hearing music, conversations, and other noises which aren’t there. The examples you mentioned in your article describing ‘Musical Ear Syndrome‘ were exactly the situations she’s describing. I was ready to ascribe her hallucinations to her age, solitude and hearing loss until I read the following paragraph.

“Another cause of auditory hallucinations is drugs and medications. Elderly people tend to take more and more medications as they age. Unfortunately, numerous drugs can cause auditory hallucinations.”

Have you any references to or about drugs which may be a cause? My mother is taking a few drugs. If there’s a generic type or class of medication (e.g., for some specific organ, bodily function, condition, etc.) that’s most likely to be a culprit, it would be hugely helpful to know.

There are a good number of drugs that known to cause hallucinations—the vast majority of which are auditory hallucinations. So far, I have found more than 280 drugs, herbs and chemicals with this property.

Unfortunately, the drugs are scattered throughout many of the drug classes, so you can’t just say, for example, “Stay away from these 3 classes of drugs and you’ll be fine.”

Appendix 2 in “Phantom Voices, Ethereal Music and Other Spooky Sounds” lists all the hallucinatory drugs and herbs of which I’m aware.

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A man asked:

A while ago a CT scan revealed I had a cholesteatoma in my left ear. I had the chance to be treated by two ENTs, but they had different takes on it. The first doctor, after seeing the scan results, immediately concluded that I needed surgery to remove it. The second doctor took me to the hospital where he worked (after seeing the scan) and took some samples (i.e., removed the part that’s anterior of the ear drum and took it for further testing.

After the results of the biopsy came in, this doctor told me that it’s not a tumor, and there was no need for surgery at this time—that I just needed to go back every 3 months for follow-up. He cleaned up the anterior part of the cholesteatoma though.

After evaluating the output from the two doctors, I decided that surgery was not necessary, so I cancelled the surgery the first doctor had scheduled. I mean, why should I suffer more hearing loss (because the first doctor told me my ear drum would be taken out during the operation) when the operation was not even necessary? At least, that is what I thought at the time.

Soon after, I went to Taiwan for a vacation (where I came from originally). Because I still had some concern about my ear, I went to a hospital and saw a famous Taiwanese otologist. I had only brought the documented report, not the scanned photos with me. Based on my description and the document (from the doctor who said no surgery was needed), the otologist said I needed the surgery because I had a cholesteatoma. He said if I don’t do anything it may eat up the nearby nerves and even damage my brain.

By the time I had the CT scan, the cholesteatoma had already eaten part of my ear bone. That was why I felt pain and had some hearing problems and had gone to the doctor in the first place.

Right now I am confused as to who I should listen to. As it stands now, its two doctors for the surgery and one against it. However, the one that said no to surgery did the most detailed examination. What’s your view on my situation? Any suggestions based on what I’ve described here? It sounds serious to me.

Cholesteatomas [koe-less-tee-ah-TOE-mahs] are a mouthful to pronounce for sure. They are not tumors. Rather, cholesteatomas are cysts that typically form in the middle ear and keep on growing. Although they are not cancerous, the fact they keep on growing makes them bad.

I like to think of cholesteatomas as an “acid” that slowly “eats” (destroys) everything they come in contact with until the day you die, or they are taken out.

Thus, I think the real question is not whether you need the surgery or not, but when—now or later.

As I see it, two doctors essentially said, “It’s a cholesteatoma and needs to come out now [before it grows any bigger and does more damage, and while it is still small enough that I can get it all before it gets into your nerves and brain]“, while the other doctor said, “Let’s wait awhile and see whether it will grow bigger [and if it gets bigger I'll take it out].

Personally, I’d side with the 2 doctors and have the operation now. Remember, one is an otologist and that counts for a lot in my opinion.

The reason I say go for the surgery now is because cholesteatomas grow and cause more and more damage as they get larger. This means if you wait, you’ll need more extensive surgery than if you have the surgery now.

This more extensive surgery may affect other things such as your facial nerve. For example, the lady who sat behind me in church had a cholesteatoma taken out. Unfortunately, the doctors had to cut her facial nerve in the process, so one side of her face was paralyzed. Hopefully, by doing it sooner, you can avoid that.

As I see it, the basic down side to having the surgery now is that you will lose much or all of your hearing on that side. So if you wait, you may have some more months (years?) of hearing on that side before you really need the surgery.

In spite of that, as a hard of hearing person, if I had a cholesteatoma, I think I’d have the surgery immediately to minimize the ultimate damage to my ear. I’d sacrifice some hearing now in order to get all the cholesteatoma before it spreads and causes further damage.

Incidentally, even if you lose all hearing on that side (because the middle ear is taken out) there are two special hearing aids that can bypass your middle ear and still let you hear because your inner ear on that side would still be good. One is the TransEar (a bone conduction hearing aid that looks like a small in-the-ear hearing aid, and the other is the BAHA (bone-anchored hearing aid).

Even if your inner ear was affected, these above two aids could pipe the sound to your good ear so you’d still be able to hear from your deaf side. Thus you have some options open to you no matter what happens.

 by Neil Bauman, Ph.D. 

A man wrote:

I just bought the MaxIT bluetooth neckloop and recently tried it in my 2003 Honda Odyssey van. The electrical interference from the engine was so loud that I couldn’t use it. As the engine went faster the sound got louder.

I then tried the MaxIT in my 1996 Toyota Rav 4 with no problem, as least at idle. Otherwise it has worked fine. As you probably know, the use of the device in the car is important to eliminate background noise while riding in the car. Thanks for any help you can provide.

What you are hearing is mostly ignition noise caused by the spark plugs firing. Unfortunately some vehicles are electrically “quiet” and others are very “noisy” as you just discovered.

About 30 years ago when I was an active radio amateur, we “hams” had to cope with the same interference to our mobile radios. Fortunately, we knew a few tricks that largely eliminated it. You can do the same. (You’d think they would do this in all modern cars, wouldn’t you?)

The first thing to do to eliminate this interference is to replace the spark plug wires with special high-resistance spark plug wires. That was often the primary fix. Also, we’d put a capacitor across the alternator and that fixed the alternator “hash”. A good garage mechanic with a specialty in electrical stuff should be able to eliminate, or at least greatly reduce, this interference to an acceptable level.

I’ve heard from numerous people who want to use their t-coils in their cars—and to their dismay, their cars produce a lot of interference. Incidentally, don’t blame the neckloop. It isn’t picking up the interference. It’s the t-coils in your hearing doing that. You just notice it when you are using assistive devices such as the MaxIT neckloop because otherwise you have your aids in microphone mode.

Magnetic interference is one thing all hard of hearing people should take into consideration when buying a car. Sit in the car, start the motor and with your hearing aids in t-coil mode see whether you can hear any interference and if so, how bad it is. If it is too noisy, look for another car, or you could have a bargaining point to have the dealership correct the problem (at no extra cost) before you buy the car.

 by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

Australian Hearing has put out a 2-page sheet entitled “The hearing impaired child in the classroom”. If you have a child in school, it is well worth the read, especially the section “Support Strategies”. Print it out and discuss it with each of your child’s teachers. Give them a copy of it to them with those sections that are particularly important to your child’s situation highlighted.

Get this article, then click on the first link “Paediatric Publications”. The article you want is the 11th one down.

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A man asked:

Could you provide sources or websites that rate hearing aids? I’m getting conflicting input from audiologists, ads, and hearing impaired folks. Where can I find an impartial source that rates hearing aids that address my profound needs?

I’m not aware of any source that actually rates hearing aids—giving their pros and cons including their reliability, how well their t-coils and other features work under real-world conditions, etc. such as you would find in Consumer Reports articles. It’s a great idea, but nobody is doing it.

There are a few sites that make lists of some hearing aids and may list some of their main features, but these lists do not contain any indication of how well these features work, or whether they are basically a bunch of hype. There are a couple of sites that from their names, sound as if they do exactly this, but when you go to them, they don’t. It’s just a “come on” to get you to their site.

The best (and most complete) lists I have found are on the Hearing Review website. They list a number of selected features for each hearing aid so you can compare their features, etc. The listings also include a colored picture of each hearing aid listed.

Every month or two, for the past several months they have listed another class of hearing aids. So far they have only listed behind-the-ear (BTE) hearing aids. They have broken them down into three classes—Conventional BTE aids, Thin/Slim Tube BTE aids and Receiver-in-the-Ear BTE aids.

These reports are well worth perusing if you are in the market for new aids. You’ll have a good understanding of what is out there and their relative features. Note: not all makes/models of hearing aids are included, but it gives you a good start.

Here are the details and links to each report.

Power BTEs  (February, 2009) 10 pages

Conventional BTEs (January, 2009) 21 pages

Thin/Slim tube BTEs (November/December 2008) 11 pages

Receiver in the Ear (RITE)/Receiver in the Canal (RIC) BTE aids (October 2008) 11 pages

ITEs [Inside the Ear] Hearing Aids (March/April 2009) 12 pages

The above lists do not give prices, but if you want to get an idea of hearing aid prices, check out Ahearingaid.com’s website. They list their prices for the most popular makes and models of hearing aids. This will give you an idea of the relative prices of the various hearing aid models and whether they will fit into your budget.

Now comes the question, “Which is the best hearing aid for me?” The best hearing aid for you depends on many factors. Some of them are subjective, so only you can make the decision, while others are objective, and your audiologist can choose those for you. For example, your audiologist can tell you which aids have enough power for your hearing loss, but only you can determine if the sound produced by these aids seems “good” to you. Furthermore, only you know which features are important to you.

Once you’ve narrowed your choices down to a short list of hearing aids that have the features you want, and the power and type that your audiologist knows you need, how do you make your final choice?

The surprising answer is that when it comes right down to it, your satisfaction with any of these hearing aids will depend, not so much on a specific hearing aid, or its features, but on the skill of the person programming it to your specific needs.

Therefore, ultimately you want to purchase a hearing aid that your audiologist has had lots of experience successfully programming, and knows how to program it for your specific hearing needs. That was the conclusion of Dr. Mark Ross, a man I highly respect because of his common-sense understanding of hearing loss, both as a highly-regarded professional in the field, and also as a hard of hearing person. (Mark has had a hearing loss for as long as I’ve been alive—which means we’ve both lived with our hearing losses for 60+ years now.)

He recently wrote an article called “Revisiting the Perennial Question: What is the “Best” Hearing Aid” in the January/February 2009 issue of Hearing Loss magazine. It is well worth the read.

 by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

Hearing aids aren’t perfect, but they help us hear better. As someone noted, “Hearing aids help me hear about as well as my grandmother’s walker helps her run!”

 by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

The wonderful Univox 2A loop amplifier (that I’ve been using for the past number of years) has just retired. Replacing it is the brand new Univox DLS-50. The DLS (Domestic Listening System) line of loop amplifiers are primarily used for home loops, as opposed to the Univox PLS (Professional Listening System) line that are used in larger venues such as churches and auditoriums.

The Univox DLS-50 is the same robust workhorse as its predecessor, and is still the same petite size. Instead of one line input and one switchable line/mic input, the DLS-50 now has two jacks that automatically switch between line or microphone inputs, and has a dedicated microphone input with its own microphone gain control.

With this arrangement, you can listen to three different devices at the same time such as the TV, telephone and a person wearing a lapel microphone. (Why you’d do that is beyond me. I have enough trouble listening to one sound source at at time!)

However, if you had a couple of hard of hearing friends over and you all had lapel microphones plugged into the Univox, you could all hear each other via your t-coils and the loop system.

More good news is that they have NOT raised the price. It is still a great buy at $179.00.

To learn more about the wonders of loop systems read the article “Loop Systems—The Best-Kept Secret in Town“.

You can see pictures and specifications of the new Univox DLS-50 here.

 by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

Advanced Bionics produces their “Bionic Buddy” calendar each year. Their website says,

Advanced Bionics has a longstanding tradition of creating a fun and inspiring calendar each year, presenting Bionic Buddy and highlighting children with cochlear implants. The 2009 Bionic Buddy Calendar is a wonderful opportunity to showcase our pediatric recipients and what they are able to hear with their cochlear implants. Parents, family members and friends appreciate being able to show off their own kids and school staff welcome the chance to show other kids that they’re not alone!

Each month it shows color pictures of 21 children with cochlear implants, and showcases another one.

To get Advanced Bionics (www.bionicear.com) “Bionic Buddy” calendar which is for kids and parents of kids with cochlear implants, click the above link . There is no charge.