Case study: tinnitus with distortion | Hacker News Reader

Case study: tinnitus with distortion

windytan.com

50 pointsSami_Lehtinen23 comments

I had/have a similar low frequency tinnitus that began in 2009 during a period of stress. It was so loud that it made it coloured every day sound including speech and music, and made sleeping a nightmare.

I eventually worked out a correlation to muscle tension in the muscles in my shoulder on the same side as the effected ear.

I worked a programme for muscle improvement through strengthening, stretching, and relaxation techniques, which alleviated noise almost completely, although occasionally I still get it a little, at a very low level.

Any more detail? I have had quite variable tinnitus for three years now on one side and am beginning to suspect it's related to muscle tension in that shoulder.

As child comment mentions, do get this checked by an ENT who will check for a few things, including tumours. I went to two, neither of whom were able to help much, but it is important to check.

Personally, there was mystery for a long time, but rather than trying to solve the mystery fully, I tried to be pragmatic and do what helped.

I found that my range of motion turning my head one way was less than the other, having become restricted physically and psychologically, in a feedback loop.

I eventually went to a dentist who specialises in fascial pain who put me on muscle relaxants. These helped a little, but did not solve my issues. However they were a clue that some of my symptoms related to muscle tension. I was also experiencing increasing amounts of physical pain in my neck and face during this time.

Look into muscle shortening. It can be cumulative, as the pain caused by shortening causes the muscle to react more to strain, by shortening further.

I tried to compare my range of motion and both sides, and gradually try to match them through gentle stretching.

You could look into these things, and also trigger points. I can't say that my exact set of issues will be the same as yours, but feel free to contact me on Twitter if you want to chat. @paulbyrne

My sister had progressive severe hearing loss, severe vertigo, and tinnitus. She resisted any treatment until she was completely incapacitated. Friends dragged her to an ER where she was scanned for tumors. Follow-up visits to ENTs (ear, nose, throat) confirmed substantial hear loss, but could not identify a cause. Despite skepticism, she went to a chiropractor and has started recovering her hearing (measured by ENT as 30 decibel improvement) and balance. About a week ago, she was adjusted and within 2 minutes noticed her hearing improve. She still has a long way to go though.

Thanks for the info! I've been to the ENT and had an MRI to make sure it's not anything more than tinnitus. Most of the time I'm fine with it, but sometimes it gets quite loud and it tends to be when I'm stressed. Which makes me more stressed!

I have the same thing. I'm almost certain the sound is associated with shoulder/jaw tension on my left side. I can raise the sound frequency by jutting my jaw forward.

Quite often the ringing is worse after a day of sitting at work and typically reaches a veritable crescendo by Friday afternoon.

Likewise the onset of my tinnitus correlates with a period of stress and long hours at work sitting down.

You should get this checked out as tinnitus in one side can be a symptom of acoustic neuroma. http://patient.info/health/acoustic-neuroma-leaflet

Yeah, I've had an MRI and was told there was nothing obvious and to habituate it, which by then I already had. However it varies quite a lot and am beginning to notice it tends to be a lot worse when I'm stressed or my shoulders feel tense.

I have tinnitus and it is aggravated by stress. I have changed my lifestyle to avoid stressful situations but it isn't easy.

Sticking to a healthy diet and avoiding alcohol have been easy wins though.

Interesting; that's indeed an uncommon form of tinnitus. If you are curious, here are some simulated samples[1].

Make sure though you set the volume at a comfortable level first, and listen all of them to get a representative idea (the first half are noisy/low-frequency; the second half are of the high-pitched variety, like my own).

[1] http://www.hearing.nihr.ac.uk/public/auditory-examples-sound...

Oh my, that's horrifying. I have #9, but that is apparently very lucky. My thoughts go out to those who suffer from any of the first few.

I have a mix of 75% no. "6" and 25% no. "9". It is loud enough that I can hear it while talking to people or walking on the street, but if I don't mind it or forget about it, I can go for days or months without hearing it. When I focus on it, it comes back shining.

Recently, I am trying to be mindful of my inner sound in a similar way to breath mindfulness.

I think so too, but I guess it's relative: my younger sister suffers from the low-pitch/noisier variety, and she thinks having a constant high-pitch in your ear must be horrifying. She might be right, but I try not to think much about it.

I can say the same about the #8 I suffer from.

FWIW, http://www.microtransponder.com/?page_id=118

Is it not possible to stimulate the vagus nerve at will, for example by coughing?

>My next plan was to use a small in-ear microphone setup to try and find out if there was an objective sound present.

As someone with some tinnitus myself I've been tempted to try that. The usual explanation you see of tinnitus is that the sound sensors break and then the nervous system makes up sounds to compensate but that's never really made sense to me. Usually if you don't get input to the nervous system because say a limb goes numb or you lose sight you don't get that kind of effect.

The ear seems to have a built in amplifier using positive feedback - the "cochlear amplifier is the outer hair cell which increases the amplitude and frequency selectivity of sound vibrations using electromechanical feedback."(Wikipedia). I wouldn't be surprised if that mechanism goes out of wack and makes a noise in the way that you can get a squealing feedback from a public address system when the gain is set too high. I'm not sure that's been experimentally tested in a way that makes if clear if that's a thing or not.

The sound is back so I did the experiment now, updates are there.

Thanks for posting. Googling elsewhere it seems only about 5% of tinnitus is objective as in being audible in a stethoscope or similar. Though it's remarkable how sensitive the ear is. Apparently at the threshold of human hearing the vibrations at the basilar membrane are of the order of 1/1000 of the width of an atom so I guess there could be stuff going on that you can't pick up with a microphone/stethoscope, perhaps.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/19...

Yes, it is indeed very rare and exceptional.

I did some more reading on how the ear works and I think my comment on there being positive feedback is wrong. Looking at how the bits are laid out and wired up it looks more like it uses amplified negative feedback in the manner of an op amp. The diagram I looked at is in Purves et al, Neuroscience 5th edition. I'm now thinking the tinnitus may be from the input maxing out when the negative feedback breaks. From a practical point I've found carrying wax earplugs helps my ears recover.

The author of this, Oona Räisänen, is one of my standard examples of someone who is genuinely a hacker in the proper (by which I mean, the Stephen Levy "Hackers" definition; if you want to use the prior MIT prankster meaning, I won't stop you) sense.

This post of Oona's - http://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from-helicopt... - in which she extracts, from the audio of footage from a news helicopter, the location of that helicopter, is an excellent example.

Given that someone here recently defined "hacker" to me as "person who can write code", the word is in serious danger of being so devalued as to be useless.

Its the first blog i have bookmarked in years. I just couldnt stop reading all the previous posts. Every post is full of interesting content not just empty useless rants. This is quite the change from the typical wannabe philosopher blogs "durr web is broken." or "10 Things To Know When Making Web App in <yyyymmdd>"

...ok back to reading the rest of the posts!

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