Hearing Damage. Any suggestions on recovery?

[marksteamnz]

OK Way off topic but some of the participants have mentioned the damage PJ's do to hearing, and the resulting deafness etc. Well I have bad tinniatus (ringing in the ears) from Sunday night and I was wondering if anyone had any tips, how long it lasts, better to wear earmuffs now to protect my ears even from normal machine noise? I'm a machinist now and have to keep feeding the mill.
The embarising bit is the damage is self inflicted....um...mumble... Shuffle.
I went to a Buzzcocks concert on Sunday and bloody hell it was LOUD, but GREAT evening. 50 year old punks playing to 49 year olds pogoing up large. http://www.buzzcocks.com/site/index.html Singles going steady is the album to buy. So I came home 4 parts deaf and still have bad ringing.

Any advice gratefully received.
(Any one quoting from Shakespere's Julius Caesar will get the fingers) VBG

[Anders Troberg]

Well, some of it will go away, but what's left after a week or so is something you'll have to live with, at least until some major medical breakthrough happens.

I'm one of those who have learned the hard way (and I roughly the same manner as you), and my hearing is really bad. If I'm on the phone and someone is talking in the room, I can't hear a word on the phone, the sound of someone grabbing a handful of potato chips out of a bag drowns out any conversation for me. I recently made a small program that played different tones through the computer, and found out that my hearing cuts out somewhere between 7 and 8 kHz.

Be careful. Even if 90% of everything said is bullshit, there is still the 10% remaining that you might want to hear.

[Mark]

I was talking to a Major in the United States Air Force who developed tinnitus from being a navigator and being around planes without proper hearing protection. He takes Ativan, (Lorazepam), a benzodiazapine for his tinnitus. He told me it was so bad he felt like pushing a pencil into his ear. I've read in really bad cases, they can operate and disconnect the nerve.
Mark
"Xanax/Klonopin/Ativan helps most people get dramatic reduction in volume and sometimes remission, without further treatment."
http://www.kevinhogan.com/FAQ.htm

[Jim Berquist]

UHHH!!! What did you say?? Sounds like me! Too many times out shooting with out protection. Too many time cranking the sound system up to 118 DB.. Too many times ,It will only be another five minutes I'm ok!! The noise you hear kind of like " IIIINNNNNNNNNNNNNNG" in your ear hole are the cells in your inner ear dieing!

No fix...No repair!!!! You did the damage!!!!!!

Let them die in peace and don't do it again!!!!! If enough die you wont have the problem to long.

Anders: The military told me I was ok because I still had hearing above 700 HZ....HA....

Jim

[Eric]

Yea you really should use hearing protection when doing stuff like drilling, and griding, expecially angle grinding.

I have lost a lot of hearing from running the large engines and dont do any shop work without wearing my excellent Swiss artillery gunner ear muffs, they kill sound dead. They are like 36 dB or maybe 38 I forget, but they work especially well in the pulsejet frequency range.


When I try to explain this to people they say "oh you have tinnitis" it is absolutely not tinnitus:

I have the ability to make the little bones (the current theory) in my ear vibrate at whatever frequency I want, in turn this moves my ear drum, and they also transmit the "sound" to the inner workings of my ear and to my brain where I hear it. I can basically "play" any music or audio and I hear it as if someone were in the room talking.

I can also use this to dampen out sound by maybe 10 dB, or create sound over ambient noise, in case theres some kind of conversation that I dont want to hear I can just play a deafening white noise.

Its not a purely neurological thing, its an actual physical mechanism, its physically fatiguing to do ie I cant do it continuously, and as I have more recently discovered that if a stehescope with a long probe instead of the normal amplification mechanism is stuck in my ear, that you can faintly hear when I do it.

We have "safegaurds" built into all our other sensory systems, if we touch something hot we jerk our hand back, or a blinding light we close our eyes or turn away quick, sound is the only thing that we dont have such a system for other than throwing our hands over our ears. Perhaps this is some sort of long lost hearing protection mechanism where we could dampen sound? I only know of 2 other people who can do this, and they are identical twins, they discovered they could do it at about the same age as I and one was able to teach the other how to do it.



Eric

[NickC]

That's extremely interesting! I wish I could do that.

Has anyone measured how many decibels of sound pulsejets actually put out? at what distance do you measure this kind of stuff?

[Greg O'Bryant]

We do have built in hearing protection, but to what extent people can control it I don't know. Some people can control heart rate etc. The problem with the tensor tympani is that it is a very small muscle and doesn't have a long endurance time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_tympani

[Eric]

Yea its definately strange, you should have seen the look on my mothers face when I was 4 and said "momy can you hear the noises im making with my ears?" lol

The problem with dB meters is that typically only the very expensive ones go about 120 - 130 dB, and even then you need to be some range away from the engine, and sound produced by the engine isnt even all the way around, some spots are very loud and others are pretty quiet relatively speaking...

If you measure the dB levels all the way around an engine at a set distance, say a linear engine for simplicity, you can then effectively calculate how many watts of sound energy are being produced.

If you want to know how many dB it is right at the plane of the exhaust / atmosphere then you need to do some math, but with a valved engine like the dynajet it can be around 190 dB peak, possibly higher if you use explosive / shock equations with existing high speed flow.

A more precise model could probably be made for pulsejets, as normal they dont fit in well with most sound sources.

PDE's I think come in at a peak of around 230 if I remember correctly, definately dont want to stick your ear in one of those.

It would be interesting to calculate how loud a large object passing through the atmosphere at near light speed would be. If it didnt vaporize the planet and strip away the atmosphere it would probably make everyone very very deaf.

Eric

[Eric]

I wonder if a reverse ear plug hearing aid were made, to amplify the noises inside my ear canal, and project them outwards, if I could freak people out and make them think that I have telepathy by talking to them without speaking..... Playing metalica out of your ears could be funny too....

A reverse hearing aid / wireless mic combination could be very interesting too, very secret agent kind of stuff..... Hopefully the CIA wont nab me now...

Those websites are interesting.

A while ago on Discovery they had all these wonderful spy technology acoustic devices, one, used a small pin hole to take in sound waves, and alter the properties of an antena, think they called it an acoustic resonator, so that when beamed with a very specific frequency it would cause a sound signal to be created, the device was undetectable when not running, and never needed batteries. The russians spied on a US embasy with it for years without detection. Its really quite amazing how incredibly bugged the embasies are, everything from I beams to cinder blocks are pre made with all kinds of listening bugs. Who only knows what they have now.

[marksteamnz]

Thanks everyone the ringing is fading, or I'm getting used to it so hopefully I won't have to take yet another set of pills.
In the shop if I'm doing any noisy stuff I always wear grade 5 ear muffs. I've found for the last two days even normal low motor noise like the lathe running has me reaching for the muffs.
Would have looked a right mumpty with a pair of yellow ear muffs on at the Buzzcocks concert. The guy beside me did sneak in a pair of ear plugs. I thought wimp but an hour later I really really wished I'd taken a pair.
Intrestingly I'm currently making circuit board testers for this crowd http://phitek.com/ who are into noise cancellation technology. I love interesting conections like that.

[Mark]

Eric: http://www.amasci.com/tesla/tesceive.html
Scroll down to "Ears as antisound-emitters"

See also http://amasci.com/freenrg/audhole.html

Interesting links Ben and what the heck are you smoking Eric? ha I was just reading in Popular Science about mescaline experimentation and some sort of really weird black hole redefinition or something. I'm so tired today. Speakers can become microphones, pulsejets can become addictive mind control agents, it's all so very mysterious.
If you could prove your point Eric, you could be rich, but don't tell Howard Stern.
Mark

[Mark]

Another thing I read today was that we all can become savants. All you do is hit your head, the frontal lobes if I recall with a powerful magnetic field and then you can count twice as many dots on a screen in a flash. Apparently you deactivate the rest of your brain and it can focus on the topic at hand and you can become Rain Man. I saw Dustin Hoffman backstage after the show when I worked at the Riviera in Las Vegas with his wife and two kids. He came to see the show Splash and I think he enjoyed it very much. They even introduced him in the audience that night I remember. He was in town making that movie and I guess he decided to take in the night life.
Mark

[Mark]

If you can force yourself, it gets interesting toward the bottom with some diagrams and such. Just hang in there, I know it looks boring at first. Too bad we couldn't have all the pulsejet gang draw up pulsejets before and after the "treatment." ha ha
Mark
http://tinyurl.com/gxnze

[larry cottrill]

It would be interesting to calculate how loud a large object passing through the atmosphere at near light speed would be. If it didnt vaporize the planet and strip away the atmosphere it would probably make everyone very very deaf.

When Krakatoa exploded (yes, exploded, not erupted!) in the Sunda Strait back in the 1880s, the sound broke the eardrums of thousands of people.

When the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, people twenty miles away didn't even know it happened until they heard about it on the news. In contrast, when Krakatoa exploded the sound was heard by people all over Japan, a couple of thousand miles away from the Sunda Strait. Man, THAT is loud.

In case anyone's wondering, the Tsunami from that explosion was estimated to have killed tens of thousands of people. It was reported that after traveling through the ocean for many hours, it eventually caused boats to bob up and down on their moorings in England.

L Cottrill

[Mark]

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.11/persinger.html
Mark