Hearing Loss Help  

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

When you look at the statistics on how many hearing aids that are sold are returned for a refund, you quickly realize that something is wrong.

Here’s the statistics. In the first three quarters of 2011 13.5% of all traditional BTE (behind-the-ear) hearing aids that used No. 10 batteries came back. This figure jumped to 22.7% for traditional BTE hearing aids that used No. 675 batteries. And surprisingly, 22.6% of the CIC (completely-in-canal) hearing aids came back. (1)

Thus approximately one in five hearing aids that are sold are being returned by unhappy users. Why?

Here are five reasons.

1. People are not getting the right hearing aids for their hearing losses. (Hint: The proper reason to buy a given hearing aid is because it helps you hear better—not because it is invisible!)
2. The hearing aids people buy are not being fitted properly to their hearing losses. (People’s hearing losses are unique and seldom fit the manufacturer’s fitting algorithm without some “artistic” tweaking. In truth, fitting hearing aids is an art as well as a science.)
3. The perceived value of their “improved” hearing via hearing aids is not commensurate with the big bucks people shelled out for those aids. (As many lament, “I still can’t hear in noise—and for this I shelled out the big bucks? It’s just not worth it.)
4. People buy hearing aids based on all the manufacturer’s hype that they will hear well again—and are sorely disappointed when they realize they don’t work well in noise or at a distance. (In spite of all the hype, changes in hearing aids have been incremental—a bit at a time. They are not “revolutionary”, nor are “big breakthroughs” happening all the time. Let’s have realistic advertising!)
5. People are told hearing aids are the answer to all their hearing problems. (Just not true—especially for people with more severe losses. Equally as important as wearing hearing aids are 3 other things—using assistive listening devices when appropriate, speechreading and practicing good hearing loss coping strategies.)

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(1) Pallarito, Karen. Consumer Skittishness Turns Hearing Aid Sales Sluggish. The Hearing Journal. Volume 64, Number 12, December 2011. p. 32.

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A lady asked,

How do you explain to people that you can only hear certain frequencies of sounds—that your hearing is very selective?

My friend, Michele, replied, “My favorite analogy is to use a music box—the kind that has the metal drum with the raised dots and tines that strike the drum as it rotates. (Most people have seen these clear music boxes that show the inner workings.) I explain that my hearing loss is much like a music box with broken tines. Imagine what it would sound like with all of the higher notes broken off and only 25% of the tines remaining. As the drum rotates I only hear every fourth note. This makes the music undistinguishable.

That’s how I hear—a bit here and a bit there. My hearing is hit and miss, but mostly ‘miss’. That’s why trying to hear with a hearing loss so tiring. My brain is constantly scrambling to make sense of the jumbled information that it’s receiving.

Most hearing people have no clue what hearing loss is really like. They think it’s a volume issue, which is partly true, but it’s more like your hearing has been pelted with buckshot that creates holes and gaps. The person with hearing loss has to learn how to make their brain fill in those holes and gaps. Many of us do that with lip/speech reading and other skills we’ve learned over the years.

One of the biggest things that got my family’s attention was listening to a hearing loss simulator as it clearly demonstrated to my husband how little I actually hear. He cried the first time I had him listen to what it sounds like to have a severe/profound loss.

Here are three hearing loss simulators I’ve used:

1. If you scroll to the very bottom of this site the ‘Profound Hearing Loss with Residual Low Frequency Hearing’ most closely matches my audiogram http://facstaff.uww.edu/bradleys/radio/hlsimulation/
2. This site only deals with mild and moderate losses, but has a great visual to demonstrate clarity: http://www.betterhearing.org/hearing_loss/hearing_loss_simulator/index.cfm
3. This site only demonstrates the difference in volume, not the additional distortions with sound quality that come with increasing hearing loss: http://www.starkey.com/hearing-loss-and-treatment/identify-hearing-loss/Hearing-Loss-Simulator“

To use these simulators effectively, set the volume to a comfortable level while listening to the recording of “normal” hearing. Then don’t touch the volume again as you listen to the various degrees and kinds of hearing loss. I think you’ll get an eye-opener (or should that be an ear-opener in this case)?

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

If you have trouble hearing on the phone, there are two basic technologies that can help you. One is to amplify speech so it is loud enough for you to hear it. The other is to convert the speech to text so you can read it. And if you want the best of both worlds, you’d want a phone that could both amplify speech and caption it at the same time.

The good news is that there are such phones. I have two of them on my desk as I write this.

The first company to provide amplified, captioned phones was CapTel. I have had a CapTel phone since they began their first trials a few years ago. Today, CapTel’s state of the art phone is the CapTel 800i, which uses a regular phone line to transmit speech and a high-speed Internet connection to send the captions to the phone’s screen.

My other phone is Sorenson’s new CaptionCall phone. Although both of these phones work about the same, the sleek new CaptionCall phone impressed me at first sight.

Yes, there are things that could be improved, but overall this is a really nice amplified, captioned phone for hard of hearing people.

The competition between these two companies is a good thing for us as hard of hearing users as each company tries to outdo each other in innovation, features, quality and price.

How to Get CaptionCall’s Phone Absolutely Free

Now here’s some wonderful news! Although this phone normally goes for $149.99, sometimes you can find a promotion that will knock $50.00 off the price so you can get it for $99.99, like I paid for my CapTel phone. However, if you act now, CaptionCall has a special promotion so that you can get this phone absolutely free.

Here’s how to get your free phone. Go to http://www.CaptionCall.com. Near the top right corner of your screen, you’ll see three green boxes. Click on the middle one labeled “REQUEST INFO”. Do not click on the “ORDER NOW” button if you want to take advantage of this free offer. In the promotion code box, type in the special promotion code “HS1283”. Fill in the rest of the form and click submit.

If you would rather phone in your order, simply call the toll–free CaptionCall customer support number at 877–557–2227. Be sure to mention promotion code “HS1283” in order to get your free phone.

In due time (and this may be a couple of days or a few weeks depending on where you live and how busy the installers are in your area) a CaptionCall installer will contact you to arrange to come out and install your phone for you. Again, this will not cost you a penny. The CaptionCall installer will show you how to use your phone and explain its many features.

If you want/need a second captioned phone, you can get a second CaptionCall phone for $99.00.

Requirements for Getting CaptionCall’s New Phone

It order to qualify for a free CaptionCall phone, you need to meet the following:

1. You must be hard of hearing yourself, or someone in your household must have a hearing loss.
2. You must live in the United States.
3. As with any other home phone, you need a landline phone connection.
4. You need a power plug near the phone. (Most amplified and captioned phones are powered by house current.)
5. Unlike other phones, this phone needs a high-speed Internet connection. The connection can be a DSL line, or it can be a high-speed cable connection as long as you have a standard Ethernet connection into which you can plug this phone.

Who Pays for the Captioned Calls?

You’ve heard the expression, “There is no such thing as a free lunch” so you may be wondering how companies such as Sorenson and CapTel can offer free captioning services. The reason captioning is free to hard of hearing (and deaf) people is because it is funded by a monthly charge on everyone’s existing landline phone bill and mandated by the Federal Government. You can see it itemized on your landline phone bill as “Telecommunications Relay Service”. According to the government website, “This charge helps to pay for the relay center which transmits and translates calls for hearing-impaired and speech-impaired people.” (So everyone with a landline phone has been funding this service all along, whether they realized it or not.) Therefore, if it will help you, go ahead and use it. That’s what it is there for.

Features and Cautions

A cool thing about the CaptionCall phone is that it is the first phone of which I am aware that actually has Wi-Fi built in. Thus, if you have a wireless router, the CaptionCall phone can connect wirelessly to your router. That way you can use it anywhere in your home without having to have a nearby Ethernet connection.

Note: the CaptionCall phone’s built in wireless antenna does not have the extended range that many routers and laptop computers have. This means that if you locate the CaptionCall phone at some distance from your router (perhaps your router is in the basement) you may have problems getting a good connection. In such cases you will need to use a direct-wired Ethernet connection. However, as long as you are reasonably close to your wireless router, (CaptionCall suggests within 30 feet as a rule of thumb) this phone works wonderfully well in wireless mode. You can tell how strong the wireless signal is by the number of bars shown on the upper right corner of the screen. Four bars indicates you have a strong signal.

The CaptionCall phone stays in captioning mode until you turn off the captioning. Thus, if you captioned your last call, it will automatically caption your next call unless you turn off the captioning in the meantime.

Also, if you have the captioning on and realize that you can hear the person fine, just press the CaptionCall button to turn off the captions (and save the fund some money since all captioned calls are billed to the fund at the rate of $1.76 per minute). By the same token, if you have the captions turned off and you receive a call and have trouble understanding the person, just press the “captioning” button and in about 5 to 10 seconds, your call will begin to be captioned. In other words, you can turn captioning on or off on the fly. You do not have to wait until the call is completed to change captioning modes.

The CaptionCall phone is easy to use and works just like a regular phone. There are no special numbers to dial or special numbers those calling you need to dial. You just pick up the receiver, dial the number like you normally would, and if you want the incoming speech to be captioned, just press the CaptionCall button at the top center of the phone. Within a few seconds anything the other person says will appear on your phone screen.

CaptionCall’s phone has a 7 inch screen. It comes with three text sizes and three contrast settings. Combined with its exceptionally smooth-scrolling text that makes text ever so easy to read. Furthermore, the wonderful screen resolution—800 x 480 pixels—gives beautiful, clear captions. You do not need to strain to read the captions, nor do they look pixilated.

Note: the accuracy of the captions ranges from near perfect to almost useless. If the person to whom you are talking speaks reasonably slowly and clearly, the resulting captions are wonderful. However, if the person speaks fast, doesn’t pause, doesn’t articulate his words clearly or has a strong accent, the captions may be pretty much useless. If this happens, you need to ask the person to repeat what they said slowly and clearly. The quality of the captions should instantly improve.

Another cool feature that CaptionCall built into this phone is how you can customize the phones frequency response to your specific hearing loss. To set it for your kind of loss, just press the “Settings” button, then choose “Amplification”. Now you have 5 choices for your kind of loss. Choose “None” if you have a “flat” curve as shown on your audiogram. If you have the rare reverse slope hearing loss, choose “Boost low frequencies”. If you have a “cookie-bit loss” choose “Boost mid frequencies”. If you have the very common “ski slope loss” then choose “Boost high frequencies”.

Now here’s a really cool feature—if you want to set the phone to exactly match your audiogram, you can choose “Custom”, then you move the green dots on the phone’s audiogram up or down by frequency to match the degree of hearing loss shown on your audiogram. (You just “push” them with your finger on the touch-sensitive screen.)

Another thing that impressed me about the CaptionCall phone is its clarity of sound. At high volumes, other phones I have used process speech so much that the speech sounds clipped and unnatural. Not so with the CaptionCall phone. Furthermore, there is no feedback like can happen with some high-powered phones.

The CaptionCall phone provides 40 dB of gain. This is plenty of volume if your hearing loss ranges down to moderately-severe or so. However, if you have a severe or profound loss and you choose not to use hearing aids when using the phone (which is what I do), you may find this gain is not enough for you. What I do is add an external amplifier between the phone base and handset for an additional 45 dB of gain. My favorite amplifier for this application is Serene Innovations UA-50. (I use it with a binaural Plantronics headset with boom microphone for handsfree operation.)

The CaptionCall phone has an 1/8 inch audio jack on the left side. Normally, an 1/8” (3.5 mm) jack would indicate you could plug in a neck loop or headphones or earbuds. However, CaptionCall goofed and wired this jack, not to fit the above, but to fit loopsets (neckloop and microphone combinations) and headsets (earphone and microphone combinations). Since these devices typically use a 3/32” (2.5 mm) plug, they don’t work either.

However, all is not lost. CaptionCall will furnish an adapter at no charge, or you can get one at Radio Shack, (# 274-0397). Then you will be able to use a loopset such as the Clear Sounds CLA7v2, but not a regular passive neckloop.

All in all, I am very pleased with CaptionCall’s new phone. It is now my favorite phone. Try it. Maybe it will become your favorite phone too. And best of all, the price is right!

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A concerned daughter wrote,

My mother is 78. She has been very reclusive since her retirement about 15 years ago and has no contact with anyone other than me on the phone and one of my brothers. Along with her isolation, she has a bit of paranoia about sounds she says she hears in the walls. At one point she cut all the phone wires to stop the noise.

She definitely has hearing loss and several years ago specialists tried to get her to use a hearing aid but she rejected it during the trial period because she didn’t like the sound of her own voice. She blasts her TV which is evident whenever I call to talk with her so I know she can’t hear well.

In the last 6 or 7 months she began complaining about music blasting at all hours of the night. The music was so loud that she would be awake at 2:00 in the morning shaking and sweating from the stress. Eventually she started to believe that my brother was doing this to her remotely, and that he probably had put speakers in her attic and walls and makes the music go on whenever he wants to drive her crazy.

I live in a different state and primarily talk to her by phone. My brother does most of her shopping and brings her to doctors’ appointments when needed. He has been a very decent care giver.

We both started researching her situation and kept coming to articles on Musical Ear Syndrome. She has been resistant to believe this is possible until recently when I printed out pages from your website and sent them to her. I think I have her attention finally. I also ordered your book and I’m hoping she reads it and continues to believe that Musical Ear Syndrome (MES) is the explanation to her situation.

It would seem that she is a prime candidate for having MES. She is elderly, female, has had tinnitus, has hearing loss, is isolated, does not use her own voice much, and has been taking Elavil for over 25 years for depression.

I have suggested to her that she read out loud several times a day. I am trying to get her to take a walk around the block a couple of times a day as well so her ears hear different sounds. I think she also needs to see a specialist who can test her, convince her she is not going crazy, that my brother is not doing anything to her and find an appropriate course of action.

I’m sure you have plenty of emails like this and appreciate any advice you can give us. I will share your response with her.

I find it sad that your mother has largely withdrawn from life. Life is so much more exciting when you “join” the world rather than live apart from it.

I hear from numbers of daughters (and a few sons) telling me about their parents’ Musical Ear experiences. Some of their parents become what appears to be paranoid—but when you understand that they are responding to (phantom) sounds (which they believe to be real), you realize that those thoughts and actions are in fact logical and rational given what they believe they are hearing is true. Of course, from our point of view they may appear to be irrational—but then, we are not “hearing” what they are hearing.

The phantom music can be loud for some people—and because it seems so real, no wonder she was afraid about what was going on. That can give rise to further, and at times farfetched, scenarios such as when she began to believe that your brother put speakers in her attic and walls and played the music whenever he wanted to drive her crazy.

Of course your brother isn’t doing this. But I’ve received similar stories where the person blamed the landlord for supposedly doing similar things, or blamed her husband.

The reason for this is that the person is desperately searching for a rational reason why they are hearing these sounds. To them, the only alternative is to admit that they are crazy. Since they don’t want to admit that they are “losing it”, they come up with “rational” reasons to blame the phantom sounds on others.

The way to help people in this situation is to explain what MES is—that MES sounds, although truly phantom, are benign sounds. In other words, the person hearing these phantom sounds doesn’t have a mental problem, but rather has an auditory problem. You need to remind them that they are not crazy—that they are sane—even though they can hear phantom sounds.

Now that you have her attention, hopefully she will stop blaming your brother. You’ll know she has things firmly under control when she can say when she hears her phantom music, “my brain is fooling me again” and let it go at that. When this happens often the phantom sounds will begin to fade into the background. But even if they don’t, she won’t be afraid of them anymore.

Unfortunately, people that are depressed tend to focus more on such things. By worrying about them, she will just make the situation worse.

Your ideas of getting her to read out loud several times a day, and to walk around the block a couple of times a day are good ideas—both for her mental and physical health as well as to try to control the phantom sounds. I have found that more social interaction, focusing on the loves of you life and surrounding yourself with real sounds all help to bring MES under control.

There are a number of other tips in dealing with Musical Ear Syndrome in my book, “Phantom Voices, Ethereal Music & Other Spooky Sounds“.

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A lady explained:

I have hearing aids and a heart pacemaker. I use a cell phone on my opposite ear but I’m having trouble hearing and would like to be able to use a bluetooth neckloop. Since I would be wearing this around my neck, would this affect my pacemaker?

I’m asked this question from time to time. As far as I know, there are no known cases of pacemakers malfunctioning because of the person using any of the various Assistive Listening Devices (ALDs) to help them hear better, but there are warnings that it could happen. Since there are no guarantees that it won’t ever happen, you still need to be careful.

From what I’ve read, you should keep any electronic device at least 6 inches away from your pacemaker. Thus, if you were wearing a bluetooth neckloop, I’d keep the “dongle” on the side opposite to your pace maker. You’d have to pin it there or it would just swing back to the center again—well within 6 inches of your pacemaker. That’s one solution.

Another solution is to use the T-links rather than a bluetooth neckloop. The T-links hook over your ears—well away from your pacemaker so they shouldn’t ever be a problem. They plug directly into your phone so you’d have to have your phone on your person—not in your purse like you could do with a bluetooth neckloop. You can see the T-links here.

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

When you get “turned on” at your first cochlear implant (CI) mapping session,  it’s a given that the sounds you’ll first hear will not sound normal at all. Don’t be surprised at the strange, robotic nature of the voices you first hear. In time, your brain will learn to understand them and they will begin to sound normal to you.

In order to help your audiologist produce the best map, you’ll need to describe these unearthly sounds and often that can be a challenge. To make things easier for you, following is a list of words people with cochlear implants have used to describe the quality of sounds they heard during or after mapping sessions.

These words also may relate to sounds people have experienced that may indicate a problem with equipment (i.e., a processor cord). Note that how one person perceives a sound may not be the same as another person might perceive that same sound, thus, words on this list could mean entirely different things to different people. When choosing a term(s) to describe your listening experience, be prepared to explain it in more detail to your audiologist.

Here’s some words to get you started.

Banging
Barking
Bass
Beeping
Blaring
Blunted
Blurred
Booming
Bottom of a Barrel/Well
Breathy
Buzzy

Cartoonish
Chimes
Chipmunk
Chirpy
Chopped Up
Clangy
Clashy
Clear
Clicking
Clinking
Clipping
Compressed
Cottony
Crackling
Crinkling
Crisp
Cut Off
Cutting Out
Cymbals

Damped
Disembodied
Distorted
Droning
Ducks quacking
Ducks underwater
Dulled

Echoing/Echoey
Electronic

Fading
Far Away
Flat
Flour-y
Fluctuating
Fog horn
Frog in throat
Fuzzy
Fuzzy on the edges

Garbled
Gargling/Gargly
Grating
Gravelly
Growly
Gurgling

Harsh
Helium
Hissy/”essi” (too much, or not enough “s”)
Hoarse
Hollow

Indistinct
Intermittent

Jumping Out

Layered

Mechanical
Metallic
Metal Pipe
Microphonish
Motorboating
Muffled
Multiple voices
Murky
Mushy
Muted

Nasal

Off the station (radio out of tune)
Ooooom
Out of Focus
Out there (voices sound disconnected from bodies)

Piss-y (“P” sounds)
Pitch
Plinky
Pointy (like “crisp”)

Quacking

Raspy
Resonant
Resonating
Reverberating
Roaring
Robotic
Rough
Rumbling

Screechy
Shadow voices
Sharp
Shrill
Sibilant (too hissy)
Snap
Soft
Solid
Spongy
Squashed
Squawky
Squeal
Squeezed
Static/Police radio-like

Tapping
Thin
Throaty
Tinkley
Tinny
Tunnel-Like/Metal tunnel
Tweety

Underwater

Vibrating

Warbling
Whiny
Whispery
Whistling
White noise

Zipper-y

Note: The words on the above list were contributed by adult cochlear implant users on the CI Forum and Nucleus Forum and compiled by Camille Jones. This list may be reprinted for further distribution. July 2, 2001; Revised May 2005. The original of this list is located at http://www.cochlearcommunity.com/data/files/E/EllenBR/Say_It_in_CI_-_by_Camille_Jones.pdf.

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A lady wrote,

I have had tinnitus for several years. It seems to be a genetic disorder as my mother and brother both suffered from it as well. I worked in the music business for years and always attributed it to the exposure to loud music and extended use of Aspirin. Both my brother and mother had heart issues. Is tinnitus related to heart disease? Also, what would cause an increase in the sound of tinnitus?

I’ve never heard of tinnitus being genetic. Rather than your family’s tinnitus being genetic, you could all have tinnitus because of similarities in your environments, lifestyles or upbringing that result in tinnitus. When that happens, it is easy to think that tinnitus might be genetic.

Being around loud music can and does cause tinnitus. So can taking a lot of Aspirin. Fortunately, tinnitus caused by Aspirin is typically temporary.

Furthermore, tinnitus can be related to heart issues—depending on the type of your tinnitus. For example, if your tinnitus pulses in unison to your heartbeat, you have a vascular kind of tinnitus called pulsatile tinnitus. High blood pressure or clogged arteries in your neck and head can cause this kind of tinnitus.

If you have heart disease and take heart medications, one of the side effects of the heart drugs can be tinnitus.

There are many factors that can cause your tinnitus to increase in volume. For example:

— being around louder sounds
— taking any of the more than 500 drugs known to cause tinnitus
— increasing hearing loss
— stress
— anxiety
— eating certain foods
— various diseases such as allergies and diabetes
— ear infections and other ear conditions, and so on.

If you want to learn more about tinnitus and a number of things you can do to help bring it under your control,  check out the new 5th edition of “When Your Ears Ring! Cope with Your Tinnitus—Here’s How“.

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

For the last number of years, we have been bombarded with hype from the hearing aid manufacturers extolling the virtues of digital hearing aids and how much better they are than analog hearing aids. Thus, I was surprised to see some very interesting information showing that analog technology is actually superior to digital technology under certain conditions.

Let me quote the pertinent part of this article. “Data…have shown that an analog single-microphone single-channel hearing aid can outperform today’s most expensive fully digital hearing aids with a myriad of noise reduction features, provided the analog hearing aids are set to real-ear verified NAL-R [National Acoustic Laboratories—Revised—a linear analog hearing aid fitting protocol] and the digital hearing aids are set according to the manufacturers ‘best fit’ algorithm.

This finding suggests that real-ear programming and aided speech audibility are more important than today’s state-of-the-art hearing aid noise-reduction features when those hearing aids are set using only the manufacturers best-fit algorithms.” (1)

What this really means is that digital hearing aids set according to the manufacturer’s suggested fitting for your hearing loss are not superior to the older linear analog hearing aids that have been set using real-ear measurements and then tweaked by a skilled audiologist that knows how to adjust them for your particular hearing loss.

Note: The NAL-R fitting is aimed at maximizing speech intelligibility, rather than restoring loudness at each frequency to normal. The former is what we desperately want—to understand more of speech, not just hear more sound.

Here’s another interesting piece of information from the same article regarding the differences between a manufacturer’s top line of hearing aids vs. their entry level (read cheap) line of hearing aids. Knowing this can save you a bunch of bucks.

“Further, it has not been demonstrated in double-blinded, randomized, placebo-controlled studies that today’s most expensive contemporary digital hearing aids provide better speech recognition in noise than each company’s least expensive hearing aid models. Until these studies are forthcoming, we cannot assume significantly better hearing aid performance will be obtained with today’s most expensive hearing aids.” (1)

Again, what they are saying here is that you can save yourself a bundle of money by buying the cheapest hearing aid in a given manufacturer’s line rather than buying their most expensive hearing aid in that line line because there is no proven difference in how well you will hear in noise.

The bottom line is that you need the services of a skilled audiologist or hearing aid dispenser rather than expensive hearing aids in order to get the most benefit from your hearing aids. All things being equal, a cheaper hearing aid in the hands of a skilled dispenser will easily outperform expensive hearing aids that were just set to the manufacturer’s “best fit” algorithm.

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(1) Leavitt, Ron. Cost-effective Pricing for Hearing Aids and Related Audiological Services. The Hearing Review. Vol. 18, No. 12. November, 2011. p. 32.

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

Numbers of people find their tinnitus, or the loudness of their tinnitus, is related to stress. I hear from people all the time who tell me that when their stress increases, so does their tinnitus.

Researchers have found the same thing. Writing about people with tinnitus, one researcher recently noted, “On a stress free day, their tinnitus may be manageable and unnoticeable. In the presence of a stressor, their tinnitus returns. It is widely known that stress, even if it may not be the main cause of tinnitus, precipitates and/or perpetuates tinnitus. Thus, teaching patients how to manage their stress more effectively is an important component of a tinnitus treatment program.” (1)

Thus, one of the effective things that you can do to help bring your tinnitus under control is to learn to control your stress. There are many different techniques you can use to help reduce your stress. Discover which works the best for yourself and watch the stress-induced component of your tinnitus “melt away” as you learn how to “hang loose”.

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(1) Herzfeld, Melanie and Francis Kuk. 2011. A Clinician’s Experience with Using Fractal Music for Tinnitus Management. The Hearing Review. Vol 18, No 11, October 2011. p. 55.

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

Doctors overprescribe medications, especially ototoxic ones. That is no secret. A doctor’s real job is to root out the source of your health problems and fix them. His job is not supposed to be that of a “band aid applier”—one who covers up the real problem with a band aid solution like treating the symptoms with drugs. Yet this is what the majority of doctors seem to be doing.

However, there is another side to the story, and this applies to you if you are already wolfing down a handful of drugs every day. One medical doctor explained, “I am a physician. Often, we are afraid to stop medications because if something bad happens, we could be sued for causing Mom’s stroke, heart attack or death.

I love it when my patients stop their medications themselves or refuse to take more, because then I am safe from our culture of blame. Many of my geriatric patients are on far too many medications and would be better off without them. It takes enormous moral courage to do the right thing in our current litigious environment.” (1)

If you are taking drugs, especially if you are taking several drugs for many months or years, you can make it easy for your doctor to really help you get off the myriad pills you take if you insist that he help you safely get off any unnecessary drugs. (As in the case of the above doctor, he may be secretly relieved you are taking this positive step to help yourself.)

I have said, and will continue to say, that drugs should be your last line of defense, not your first line of attack. There are many other safer and effective treatments you should try first. Not only will you help improve your health, you will not be putting your ears at risk from all the ototoxic medications out there.

Far too many older people gulp down a handful of pills every day. Often the original medication was to treat some condition. Many of the subsequent pills were prescribed to treat various unwanted side effects from that original medication. Then more drugs are added to treat the side effects of those pills, and on and on it goes.

As a result, you end up being grossly overmedicated. Taking all those extra (and largely unnecessary) drugs leads to all sorts of physical, mental and emotional problems such as depression, anxiety, confusion and a false diagnosis of dementia, especially if you also have an untreated hearing loss.

Don’t let ototoxic drugs inadvertently damage your ears and leave you with hearing loss, tinnitus or balance problems. To learn which drugs are ototoxic, get the 3rd edition of Ototoxic Drugs Exposed. This book contains information on the ototoxicity of 877 drugs, 35 herbals and 148 chemicals.

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(1) Physician Warns about Drug Dangers. The People’s Pharmacy. October 24, 2011.