Audio By Carbonatix
Joel Styzens was a serious professional drummer and percussionist,
practicing three to four hours a day and playing three to four hours a
night at gigs. He did this six or sometimes seven nights a week with
big jazz bands and percussion ensembles—until one morning, three
years and four months ago, when he woke up with a high-pitched ringing
in his ears.
It was like the tone of an old tube television warming up,
maddeningly steady. Obsessed with the incessant ringing, he figured out
all he could about it. It seemed to have multiple tones, some in
harmony with each other, some clashing. But the dominant note was a
high A-sharp. For a lifelong musician, the first manifestation of
tinnitus was a terrifying sound.
“Everything I was working toward all my life, how I identified
myself—suddenly it was all up in the air,” he says by phone from
Chicago. “It was so bad at first, I was hearing sounds distorted in my
left ear, crackling, and my ears were so sensitive sometimes I could
barely go outside. I didn’t know if I could ever play drums again, or
even music.”
Ennis investment banker Kenneth Smith, 74, started developing his
symptoms in the early 1990s. Unlike Styzens’ constant tone, his
tinnitus sounds like thousands of crickets in the room with him.
Doctors told him he would have to learn to live with the phantom
sounds, which he tried to do. Vitamins sold as tinnitus relief provided
none, so he tried to mask the sound by keeping the radio or television
on at all times. But about a year ago, the volume of the crickets grew
so intense that he could no longer think, let alone concentrate on his
work.
“I had heard of people committing suicide because of tinnitus,”
Smith says. “I would never do that, but frankly, I thought it might be
the only solution.”
One day, his wife walked in on him banging his head against a wall
and drew the line: He had to do something.
More than 50 million Americans suffer from tinnitus, according to
American Tinnitus Association estimates. Of these, some 12 million
patients have tinnitus severe enough to seek medical attention, and 2
million are unable to function on a day-to-day basis. The disorder
often accompanies hearing damage caused by exposure to loud noise,
including music, resulting in such famous sufferers as Eric Clapton,
Pete Townshend, Neil Young and My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields. But
noise isn’t always the cause. Symptoms can manifest after viral
infection, stroke, injury or change in medication. Styzens noticed his
symptoms after a particularly busy few months of music gigs. Smith,
however, hasn’t been exposed to much loud noise. He doesn’t crank up
the volume on his preferred country and classical music or go to rock
concerts, nor does he work around loud equipment.
Worse, the disease has no cure and just a few options for relief.
But a promising new therapy has made its way from Australia to the
States. The Callier Center for Communication Disorders at University of
Texas at Dallas is one of about 200 medical centers offering
Neuromonics, a treatment device for tinnitus developed by an Australian
audiologist, Dr. Paul Davis.
Styzens and Smith are among the earliest users of Neuromonics in the
world. Styzens started the treatment at an audiology clinic in Highland
Park, Illinois, while Smith is one of about 30 patients undergoing the
treatment through the Callier Center.
Dallas audiologist Anne Howell, head of Callier’s tinnitus clinic,
says the treatment works by retraining neural pathways in the brain. As
a result, the auditory system is desensitized to the sound.
The Neuromonics device, which looks like a portable MP3 player,
plays four tracks of music and ambient nature sounds. Overlaying the
soothing music is the neural stimulus treatment, which targets the
brain’s auditory pathways and helps the brain filter out the disturbing
tinnitus perception. The music and overlaying neural stimulus on each
device is customized to the patient’s audiological profile and personal
tinnitus frequency (“frequency” here meaning pitch, not how often it
occurs). The customization requires tests to determine the frequency
and intensity of the disorder’s symptoms for each ear.
According to data presented at last month’s AudiologyNOW! conference
in Dallas, a multi-site, 45-patient study showed that the average
Neuromonics patient’s drop in Tinnitus Handicap Inventory (THI) score
is a clinically significant 26-point reduction from a moderate level of
46 to a mild level of 20.
Thus far, the demands of the treatment will probably limit its use
to patients with the most severe symptoms. Neuromonics requires six
months of daily use, at a minimum of two hours per day, preferably at
the times when the tinnitus is most bothersome. The treatment is
expensive too, running from $4,000 to $6,000—and insurers are
predictably reluctant to shell out for it.
“There’s a variety of reasons that insurance companies say when they
send back claims saying ‘No, we’re not going to cover this,’ but coding
is one of the biggest things,” Howell says. “Neuromonics has been
lobbying to get coding so that insurance companies will pay for
treatment. It’s a barrier for people who can’t pay cash out of
pocket.”
Another barrier for patients is the lack of tinnitus understanding
among primary care physicians, Howell says. All too frequently, doctors
dismiss the symptoms and tell patients to get a grip and learn to live
with it. For musicians, though, that’s not always possible. One of
Howell’s patients, a classical musician, had to stop teaching lessons;
another musician patient struggled to continue teaching. Citing privacy
concerns, these two locally treated musicians declined comment for this
story.
But Smith calls the device a life-saver. He noticed some relief of
his symptoms within just two days of using it. Some six months after
starting, his symptoms had improved so much, they were noticeable only
when he thought about them.
“My children said they’ve never seen such a change in me,” he says.
“It’s made an unbelievable difference.”
Styzens, too, says the device has provided an immense emotional and
psychological boost. Even so, the tinnitus has forced major changes in
his music career. He still teaches percussion, but now uses electronic
drums amplified at low volume rather than live drums. As for his own
music, he now writes and records soothing instrumental songs for
acoustic guitar. In fact, he’s gone so far as to start his own record
label to collaborate with and support musicians with hearing
ailments.
The label is named for the single note that threatened to derail his
career but has since been relegated to background noise: A-Sharp.
