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Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

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Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#131
post #56

For anybody suffering with tinnitus I highly recommend the protocol William Shatner went through. You can train your brain so it’s not noticeable any more. Like wearing pants, it fades into the background.

Berard Auditory Integration Training and the Tomatis Method are also worth looking into depending on what's going on; a book called "Hearing Equals Behaviour: Updated and Expanded" goes into detail on the above treatments.

The Tomatis Method is a little pseudoscience-y for my tastes -- you have to buy the tapes / app / etc. directly from the Tomatis folks, and I've never seen any good studies from a non-conflicted third party that support its efficacy.

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#132

I really hope this could also help revert tinnitus. This is a life wrecking condition that currently has no cure (suicide attempts 9% for women with severe tinnitus and 5.5% for men).

But you can certainly learn to ignore it. After one particularly loud concert, my ears started to ring, and they have never really stopped. I was depressed, disappointed, and angry with myself for not having taken better care of my ears. But you know what? After 6 months to a year, I habituated to it. I notice the ringing on a super quiet morning in the countryside when there aren't any other sounds, but other than t…

"Certainly" is a wild stretch. That may be true for mild cases, but then there are people out there where the Tinnitus sound is louder than 100 decibel. One cannot learn to ignore that, especially not when it is permanent.

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#133
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Berard Auditory Integration Training and the Tomatis Method are also worth looking into depending on what's going on; a book called "Hearing Equals Behaviour: Updated and Expanded" goes into detail on the above treatments.

The Tomatis Method is a little pseudoscience-y for my tastes -- you have to buy the tapes / app / etc. directly from the Tomatis folks, and I've never seen any good studies from a non-conflicted third party that support its efficacy.

All of the science and math behind the algorithms are available - you can recreate it yourself, but like most things it's easier to buy what someone else has already put the work in. I'd recommend getting and reading the book to balance out a perspective.

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#134
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Although exciting, we also need to remember that translatability rates from animal models to humans is notoriously low, usually in the single digits for most therapeutic areas. This is true of humans as well -- there are plenty of programs that get interesting and clear results in Phase 2 (the dose ranging phase: essentially "what dosage is most efficacious") that die in Phase 3 (roughly: "OK, how does that dose re…

It's also hard to figure out just how the animal's hearing is improving (you can't simply ask) This seems relatively easy, right? Play a sound at a given frequency, associate it with a food reward. Like Pavlov's dog, but vary the frequency of the bell. Oversimplification obviously, and "easy" is extreme relative to all the other hard parts involved but that part seems very doable

More simply, play a loud sound in a narrow band and check if there's a startle response.

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#135

The article says the treatment focuses on increased speech intelligibility. Speech, depending on how you define it, can occupy a fairly narrow range of the audio spectrum that humans can perceive. My hearing loss is mostly on the high end (10-12K and above) and impedes my ability to hear speech in noisy environments. More troubling has been the inability to enjoy music/sound in those upper ranges, resulting in the mu…

I have sudden deafness in my left ear (meaning: I just woke up deaf one day and they don't know why) in exactly the frequency range used for speech. Even more than a decade later it feels weird that I can still hear certain common background noises but humans are almost completely silent on my left side

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#136

The article says the treatment focuses on increased speech intelligibility. Speech, depending on how you define it, can occupy a fairly narrow range of the audio spectrum that humans can perceive. My hearing loss is mostly on the high end (10-12K and above) and impedes my ability to hear speech in noisy environments. More troubling has been the inability to enjoy music/sound in those upper ranges, resulting in the mu…

This reminds me of one aspect of my hearing loss that's been hard to explain.

Amplification doesn't fix everything. My hearing loss is complex, a mix of conduction problems in the middle ear and something neurological as well. I can hear very high and very low frequencies surprisingly well. There's a big bite out of the main speech band, though.

I find that speech, with background noise, that goes through a mediocre microphone, 200 - 3000 Hz pass filter, and then a digital compression codec, and then through a loudspeaker -- no matter how loud -- can sometimes be nearly unintelligible to me. It's loud enough. But I can't figure out which sound that's supposed to be. It's just too distorted.

I take my hearing aids out to listen to music, most of the time. Despite usually being able to better hear the melody and lyrics with the hearing aids in. Because I know the sparkle you speak of, and it's wrecked by all but the very best-quality electronic amplification. Some people think it's odd that I'm finnicky about quality speakers, etc. when I'm half deaf. But every decibel of SNR counts when I lose most of it in my head.

(And I too hope one day they can fix that for both of us.)

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#137
Word of advice, this is interesting and worth paying attention to.

However, hearing loss has already been successfully cured before decades ago. I remember reading back in the 80s that it was only 10 years away.

It actually worked.. only problem is, the dosage required was toxic for humans.

So when they say it is years away, take it literally and assume that might be forever.

If you have hearing loss that can be treated by other therapies today, do not wait for tomorrow, because tomorrow may not come.

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#139

As one who is undergoing mapping of Cochlear Implant, I feel the need to put it out there some things about regrowing cilia hairs in cochlear. If you had been subjected to a life-threatening high body temperature (106.5+ F, spinal meningitis), your cochlears would make for a poor candidate in benefitting from most form of treatment of cilia hair regrowth. The problem is the fibrocyte nerve pathways (the ones embedded…

I lost one of my ears in a high fever episode when i was a child. I guess what you wrote means i shouldn't get my hopes up for these kind of treatments :(

Re: Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As my own normal, age related roll off advances, I find all the good stuff is under 10 to 12Khz. I mentioned different eq curves down thread. I don't have a lot of technical data at hand, but older radios from the vacuum tube era where they had response over 10 khz. A good one, play that a respectable volume in a room, sounds pretty great! What I'm kind of hinting at here is there maybe Equalization curves that can s…

That's not surprising, as what we think of as "presence" is usually in the ~4 KHz range, where our ears are the most sensitive. What's over 10 KHz may provide a sense of "air" but doesn't convey as much information.

Yup. Agreed.

Maybe the 4khz range is what was emphasized on older audio gear. I am thinking about the great overall impact that gear delivered is intriguing to me.

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