Auteur: Scheijen Dyon

Misophonia

Yesterday I was participating at the first conference about Misophonia.

From my dear friends and colleagues Jacqui Sheldrake and her son Nick Lee, directors of the Tinnitus and Hyperacusis Center, London I am so happy to know the story behind the word Misophonia.

Guy Lee, the grandfarther of Nick, was a classicist, he taught Latin at St John’s College in Cambridge, he and Pawel Jastreboff, the funder of the Tinnitus Retraining Therapy, needed a word that meant in a kind of word “reaction to sound” and they sat and chatted over a cup of tea and a piece of cake one afternoon and then Lee thought it up.

Miso means “hatred of” comes from Ancient Greek and phonia means “sound” or “speech” and is a long known medical term.

It was because the Americans couldn’t be told they had phonophobia by an audiologist as phobias were of course the domain of the psychologist. Even if the psychologist is the discipline where treatment is the best way to go, a person should first be motivated and getting insights in how complex the hearingsystem works. So there we have the essential part of a good Misophonia treatment, a interdisciplinairy approach where both, audiology and psychology meet eachother.

So Misophonia, it sounded right and so all the professionals started to use this word as part of decreased sound tolerance in the 1990s. and now still it will be used in the future.

Tinnitus Research Initiative conference 2018

Today I had a chat with Jacqui Sheldrake and her son Nick Lee, directors of the Tinnitus and Hyperacusis Center, London. I know them already for many years, did my Tinnitus course in the early ninety’s at the center of London. From there on we are good friends forever.

And we all like art, we love to visit museums, walk and watch artists from the very past and the future. But in our work in audiology we see a lot of tinnitus patients and therefore having our long discussions about tinnitus and audiology too. During our walks through museums and cathedrals we also have chats about our work in audiology.

Today we had one issue which brought us a lot of new insights. Technology in hearing devices is changing fast.

Within several years we can use our smartphone to connect to an amplifier in our ears. So when we are in a crowded environment we then can use it as if we had a device to improve speech perception in general.

So from out of this there will be a change in how people will act on hearing devices. Even then mild hearing losses will have a benevit out of this. Using hearing instruments will be as using glasses for reading. It will be a gadget people want to use, cause it will give a better speech perception than normal hearing people can have better speech clarity in the same acoustic circumstances.

And from out of all this, even for some tinnitus patients this could bring in a better speech perception, lesser acoustic difficulties to focus on what is said, and from there on more focus on what is heard, lesser influence of tinnitus in hearing, and so the tinnitus is not the problem in hearing anymore. But from all this it is neccesary not to have the focus on tinnitus, in using hearing aid or hearing devices improve the hearing in the first place.