im gonna have to keep seeing that tinnitus article over & over aren’t i :/
notes full of people like ‘omg i can’t believe doctors have been misunderstanding what tinnitus is’ and 'i didn’t know doctors thought tinnitus was imaginary’ yeah no the information about tinnitus in the article is actively misleading. no medical authority thinks tinnitus is universally a brain problem bcos it demonstrably is not.
How is the info in the article misleading? Because I read it to my Mum who has tinnitus and never went to a doctor about it because she’s of the gen where it was considered to be a brain/ear thing and therefore unfixable - and she has since started looking up whether there are treatments availble, and she’s been dealing with it for like, 40plus years at this point.
Like, admittedly I skimmed the article to where it got interesting, it was a bizarre read elsewise, but yeah, would love to hear your take on this.
- it presents the concept of tinnitus being a physical noise that can be picked up by recording equipment as if it’s a brand new discovery. it is not, this is called objective tinnitus and is a known condition.
- the article says that the NHS defines tinnitus as a brain problem. this is not true - the NHS just defines tinnitus as 'hearing noises in your ears that don’t have an external source’. tinnitus is associated with a whole host of physical disorders.
- doctors do sometimes attribute cases of tinnitus where they can’t find a cause to stress but not all doctors do that; and even if they did, it still wouldn’t be the case that the NHS universally defines tinnitus as a brain problem. as stated above, they do not, because it is not.
- when I first starting seeking medical help for my tinnitus i was under the impression that all tinnitus was caused by damage to your hearing which turned out not to be the case. so how laypeople think tinnitus works and how doctors think tinnitus works are not necessarily the same!
- even if the medical consensus was at some point that tinnitus was universally an unfixable brain problem (I find this unlikely based on the range of physical conditions that are known to cause it - meniere’s disease causes tinnitus and it was first identified in 1861), the article was written about the present day and that is not the current medical consesus.
does that all make sense?
Yeah, that makes perfect sense, and I didn’t get the whole brain thing, except as like maybe your hearing got damaged but fixed itself, and now the sound is psychosomatic. But I’m fairly sure that psychosomatic symptoms usually mask an underlying problem, or at least, that’s how I understand it based on some stuff I’ve read.
But yeah, no, that makes heaps of sense, and I kind of wish it was more generally known; because yeah, as I said, my Mum’s been dealing with it for 40+ years and always said she wished she could get it fixed but it’s “just one of those things”.
I’m pretty sure hers is from hearing damage, too many live gigs in the 80s and 90s; but given her recent diagnoses with a few chronic health problems, maybe it’s not. Idk. I might press her into seeking treatment, tbh.
Mostly, though - thank you for the information and clarification; and also, do you ever think that the medical science industry needs a better PR team? Because I have got to stop learning groundbreaking shit on tumblr and yet, I probably won’t.
So yeah, huge thanks, I really appreciate the time you took to answer my question. :)