Steve is Retail Director at Ascent Hearing, he wears hearing aids himself and also suffers from tinnitus.

I have had tinnitus since the age of 33. Well to honest, I’ve had “fizzy” tinnitus since I was about seven. But I’ve had pulsing, thumping, throbbing, whooshing tinnitus since 33. It’s not a depressing thing to have as I’ve not had silence for such a long time. However, I have tried eating vast swathes of Marmite (for the vitamin B), chewing decongestants, hot saunas, eight pints of water a day… nothing.

But, every time I fly, it goes away. Only for a couple of days, but it goes – completely! I have absolutely no idea why this is but I thought I’d share it with you. Steve I believe you get tinnitus although I’m not sure what type. There are probably other people who watch this website who also suffer from pulsatile tinnitus. Does anyone have any similar experiences or comments? I can see that the Internet is rammed full of dodgy “Cures”. I can also see that everyone has their own little combination of things that help reduce it.

Does anyone else have a positive result when they fly?

Imagine arriving at work to find that your phone has been taken away while your colleagues still have theirs. And one year on, you’re still without a phone.

That’s what happened to Simon Pearse and Alan Goldsmith last November. Pearse, an actuary who is hard of hearing, started using a technology called captioned telephony (CapTel) to make calls after his company switched to a digital phone system on which he found it difficult to hear clearly. In captioned telephony calls, an operator turns the voice of the hearing caller into captions on the phone of the deaf caller using voice recognition software. Put simply, it is a phone with subtitles.

Goldsmith, a manager at DSM, a global chemical company, says the system enabled him “to have real telephone conversations. In fact, some people who know me had thought my hearing had returned!”

The two men are not alone. An Ofcom feasibility report into relay services found that between 420,000 and 1.2 million people have difficulty in using voice telephony. While many are elderly and could be put off by new technology such as CapTel, the potential uptake is still huge.

Hello, operator?

However, relay phone services depend on subsidies to remain affordable for customers: it is adding the human operators that drives up the cost. As Ross Trotter, vice-chairman of the National Association of Deafened People, told the BBC recently: “For hearing people, a phone call costs a penny a minute. For a deaf person using a video or captioned relay service, the cost is nearly £1 a minute.”

Although CapTel is alive and well in the US, in the UK the service was subsidised by government funding that cost between £70 and £600 per user. This confined the service to working hours, and not enough people used it and the service closed down last November after 18 months, with nothing to replace it.

Read the article in full at The Guardian.

The Sonova Holding AG (previously Phonak Holding AG) have posted their 2007/2008 financial report.

Sales across all brands, including Phonak and Unitron reached a new record of US$1.16 billion (1.2 billion CHF) – with 59% of hearing system sales being generated from products launched less than 2 years ago.

New product releases in the last year have included Phonak’s Exélia and Naída, and Unitron’s Yuu and Next, as well as the iCom, iPilot, and iCube. Its distribution network has been extended further, and the company has established new offices in India, Mexico, and South Africa. In addition, Phonak’s “Hear the World” initiative has attracted new attention, especially from ambassadors, including Mick Jagger, Annie Lennox, and Rod Stewart.

The company expects to further expand its market share, anticipating organic sales growth of around 10%, in the 2008/09 financial year.

Sonova’s 2007/2008 financial report.

YouTube have, at long last, added subtitle/caption support to their videos. Their blog says that they hope this will makes the videos they host more accessible to more people, including the deaf and hard of hearing.

You can add subtitles to a video you have uploaded by uploading a closed caption file using the “Captions and Subtitles” menu on the editing page. It’s possible to upload multiple caption files to support subtitles in different languages.

Unfortunately it is not yet possible to search for videos that have captions but I’m sure they’ll add that soon.

You can get help with subtitling your video using the YouTube links:

• How do I turn captions or subtitles on/off or change languages?
• How do I add or edit captions/subtitles?
• Can I get help captioning or subtitling my video?

Tinnitus retraining therapy (TRT) is a treatment that aims to reduce the perceived loudness and severity of tinnitus. Tinnitus isn’t a disease and TRT isn’t a cure as such, it is perhaps better described as a way to train someone not to hear the ringing in their ear any more or at least to be less aware and less irritated by it.

TRT uses a combination of counselling and sound therapy. Sound therapy is the creation of background sounds that, when listened to over time, train you to stop having negative associations with noise and then, hopefully, to stop you perceiving the tinnitus completely. You can get your own sound masking gadgets specifically for tinnitus sufferers, such as sound pillows and iPod apps – these are similar to the sound therapy in TRT in that they introduce background noise to mask the tinnitus but TRT has been thoroughly researched and tested with sounds used giving proven results, TRT uses the Jastreboff model.

The goal of TRT is to reduce a person’s perception of their tinnitus to such a point that they are no longer affected by it, this is known and habituation. Wikipedia notes that, “Repeated presentation of a stimulus will cause a decrease in reaction to the stimulus“, essentially, you get used to it and you no longer bother to notice it. So, if someone is experiencing tinnitus for a long time, why doesn’t habituation occur naturally? Apparently it does, many tinnitus cases will decrease and eventually disappear given time. Your brain eventually gets bored of the sounds by itself, but TRT helps to speed that up.

Confused about habituation? Think about this: when you enter a room for the first time you notice everything, you look at all the pictures on the wall, the furniture, the colour of the carpet, you drink the room in, your brain is working hard to absorb all the new information about the room. When you enter the room the second time the affect isn’t so extreme, it’s still new to you but you know where most of the furniture is already. As the weeks go on you know what to expect when you enter the room, you’ve noticed all the dirty marks on the wall and the crack in the TV cabinet. After a long time you are so used to things being where they are that you stop seeing them, of course they are not invisible but your brain treats them as background noise that isn’t important.

Everton FC are another football club from the English Premier League that are launching a range of hearing aids in their club colours.

The Liverpool Echo reports:

Young Evertonians with hearing difficulties can now proudly wear their team’s colours – on their ears.

The Blues have joined forces with scientists to tackle the problems hard-of-hearing children face while wearing hearing aids.

Together they have created special clear hearing aids carrying Everton’s world-famous club crest.

The aim is to make Merseyside children proud of their hearing aid, not embarrassed by it, and the new devices are already proving popular among young Blues.

The Better Hearing Initiative was set up by Starkey Laboratories, the world’s largest manufacturer of hearing aids.

Suzie Butcher, from Starkey Laboratories, said: “Many children suffering with hearing problems can often experience bullying among their peers and feelings of embarrassment from using hearing aids.

“We have seen a fantastic response from children who have opted for a football-designed aid.

“It really transforms it from being something children can be ashamed of to an object of aspiration.”

I think this is a great idea. As Suzi Butcher says in the quote above, putting hearing aids in shells sporting pictures of things that kids love is a great way to turn them from being something they hate wearing into something they want. How long before we see a High School Musical hearing aid?

Town Criers are a long-standing tradition here in the UK. They are employed by a local authority to make public announcements in the streets – they were first used in Medieval times but we still have some around today. They shout their announcements in public places and ring a bell to get attention.

These people are loud and when I say loud I mean really loud. I’m talking a Harley Davidson revving-up right next to your eardrum loud.

So this story from the Daily Telegraph comes as no surprise: Veteran town crier, Keith Jackman,  has been deafened by the sound of his own bell after spending 25 years giving proclamations in the streets.

He said: “The local council tested me once on a noiseometre and it registered 118 decibels. Concorde taking off is only a bit louder than that.”

“My hearing started to deteriorate in my right ear about 10 years ago because I ring the bell in my right hand.”

“It was very gradual so at first I did not notice anything different but then I started to struggle to pick up people’s words and the television always sounded muffled.”

It wouldn’t surprise me if Keith did some damage to other people’s eardrums during his career too – these guys really need to be heard to be believed.

Mr Noisy’s article in the Telegraph.

A survey carried out by Australian Hearing has found that:

MORE than 70 per cent of young adults suffer from the first sign of hearing loss.

The survey, commissioned by Australian Hearing, found adults aged between 18 and 24 reported suffering from tinnitus or ringing in the ear.

Professor Harvey Dillon, director of the National Acoustics Laboratory at Australian Hearing says that he was surprised by the results as it is a higher percentage than reported by the older respondents.

The report goes on to say that, quite rightly, the results are possibly due to excessive MP3 player use at high volumes.

70% is a high percentage – a scary number and one that I can’t quite bring myself to believe. I am all for educating people about the dangers of listening to MP3 players  but is it really the case that 700 of the 1000 people Australian Hearing asked are listening to their iPod at dangerous levels?

The Is Australia Listening report.

Guardian reporter Sam Wollaston spends a day with the Woolfe family. He is hearing and the Woolfe family – Ramon and Louise and their three children: Jasper, Layla and Spencer – are all deaf.

The article starts:

I should have been prepared for it, I suppose – the silence. But it strikes me immediately. And, to begin with, I find it difficult. Here is a family behaving exactly as every other family in the country behaves every morning – having breakfast, getting ready for school, putting the wrong shoes on the wrong feet, not wanting to put coats on. But someone has hit the mute button, and it is all happening in silence.

Well, not quite. After a while other, non-conversation sounds – the hum of the fridge, birdsong outside, the crunch of cereal being munched – begin to emerge out of what I originally mistook for silence. All that is missing is the conversation, the talking, whining, yelling etc that normally goes with such a family situation. It is like a song with the lyrics removed.

Of course, there is exactly the same kind of conversation going on as any other family would have every morning. It’s just that the words are being signed instead of spoken verbally. I don’t know sign language, though. That is why I am here: I don’t really know any deaf people, have never been exposed to deaf culture. I am in at the deep end, the deep end being a smart house on a new development on the edge of Swindon.

Read it in full on The Guardian.

I really like this article. I love the way Sam starts to appreciate the quiet in the Woolfe household. It’s also interesting that, despite Ramon and Louise’s best efforts, Sam starts to feel isolated because he can’t understand BSL – “Oi! Hello? Hearing people like to know what’s going on too“, great quote and I’m sure many of you know exactly what he feels, I know I do.

The Royal National Institute for the Deaf (RNID) have simple hearing checks that you can use to help you determine whether you have a hearing problem or not. They are not full hearing tests as you would get if you visited an audiologist – it’s more of a first step to help you judge whether you need to go and see an audiologist for a full assessment.

The have an online test, which you can try by clicking this link. The number for the telephone test is (UK) 0844 800 3838.

Both tests are speech in noise tests, which basically means that you will listen to people talking in different environments where this is some kind of background noise and you’ll be asked to identify what they said. The test takes about five minutes to complete.

There’s more info on the RNID site.