Meniere’s Disease Is One Cause of Tinnitus
Meniere’s Disease is a condition which afflicts about 615,000 people in the US. Meniere’s Disease is caused by a dysfunction of the endolymphatic sac in the inner ear.
Since Meniere’s is associated with the cochlea, it can potentially impact hearing, balance, and perceptual disorders, such as tinnitus. Tinnitus is most often related to hearing loss, and most people experiencing tinnitus have some degree of hearing loss, although not all people with hearing loss have tinnitus.
Silere Medical Technology is developing a medical device that will suppress chronic tinnitus, which can be debilitating for many people. Although many products and therapies are available that present an auditory signal designed to alleviate the condition, there is nothing available today which suppresses tinnitus.
“Silere Medical Technology is developing a medical device that will suppress chronic tinnitus…”
That is really cool. As a person coping with tinnitus, I find it encouraging that someone is trying to do something about it.
I think there is a huge and growing market there. The human auditory system is vulnerable. It evolved in relatively quiet environments where sensitivity, not ruggedness, was adaptive. The protohumans who could hear the lion a long way off lived on to reproduce.
Starting in the mid 1950’s, Western musical culture has been fundamentally based on loudness. Loudness as an end in itself is universally valued. All popular music today is written, produced, and recorded to sound better at high volume, and that’s how people listen to it. You can put out all the PSAs you want, they’ll still do it because that’s our cultural norm.
There’s another aspect of today’s music that I suspect may be damaging: compression. The way recordings are mastered these days is they bring up the quieter sounds so there’s much less dynamic range and everything is closer to the same volume. It makes the music sound louder at lower volume, and (supposedly) makes it sound better or “punchier.” I think if you take a Buddy Holly record and a Beyonce record and play them at the same volume, Beyonce is going to be more dangerous because there are no quiet parts. It’s all loud, top to bottom.
In any case, there’s your market. It’s huge and it’s only going to get bigger.