Wednesday, January 09, 2008

About a year ago I bored Posthuman Blues readers about my attempts to combat a sudden (and almost crippling) case of tinnitus. The problem has abated but it's far from gone. The good news is that there are some new treatment options:

New hope for tinnitus sufferers

Berthold Langguth, a neurologist in Germany, believes the hearing cells in the auditory cortex (the brain area perceiving sound signals) in tinnitus sufferers are overactive and is trying to normalise them.

By running an electric current through sections of wire he creates a magnetic field. When held over the head of a patient the magnetic stimulation reduces the neural activity and diminishes unwanted sound.

Only one patient so far has been completely cured but many have found the volume of their tinnitus reduced.

In Belgium, neurosurgeon Dirk De Ridder, has tried implanting electrodes directly into the brain of sufferers to permanently normalise the overactive neurons.

So far he has only operated on 30 patients but with some successful results.


(Thanks to Frank for sending this my way.)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've had good luck with autosuggestion. (I sit in my car with a foxy date and make a suggestion, LOL! ;-)

Anonymous said...

I wonder what might happen if you were to do variable winding on different size or configuration metal coils, coupled with a potentiometer, to create variable electromagnetic fields, like adjustable magnetic-field earphones.

Of course, you'd want to be careful, to avoid the Persinger "external presence" effect! 8^}

Mac said...

Of course, you'd want to be careful, to avoid the Persinger "external presence" effect!

Ha! Tinnitus might be preferable to temporal lobe hallucinations!