Jacqui Furneaux
Ringing in your ears? Wind noise driving you mad? Your ears
ok and you'd like to keep it that way? Jacqui Furneaux looks at a
common condition for many motorcycle riders, what causes it and
possible ways to prevent it.
In October, an eye-catching headline in a UK newspa-
per read ‘Killed by tinnitus’. It went on to describe how
a 42-year-old tinnitus sufferer committed suicide be-
cause of his condition. It had become so intolerable to
him, he hanged himself. Thankfully this is a very rare
occurrence and is usually accompanied by an underly-
ing depressive condition.
So, what is tinnitus and why is this article in a motor-
cycling magazine?
The word comes from the Latin for ‘ringing’. For
most sufferers, this is how the condition presents …
ringing in the ears. Others experience buzzing or whis-
tling, sometimes all three. You know the sort of thing
… after a loud concert, there’s a ringing in your ears
that disappears after a while. With tinnitus, it doesn’t go
away.
Tinnitus may, or may not, be associated with a degree
of hearing loss. The noises may be hardly noticeable or
of a more obtrusive nature. It’s an individual condition
and most people with tinnitus find methods to enable
them to live with it. People who dwell around Everest
are so enchanted by these ‘magic’ noises, they consider
tinnitus to be a privilege. This positive attitude is the
key to coping with what can otherwise be an unwelcome
intrusion.
Although the precise cause of tinnitus is not fully un-
derstood there are factors which are known to be instru-
mental to it. Age, ear disease, blows to the head, stress,
compacted earwax, jaw joint dysfunction and aspirin
overuse can all be contributing factors. But loud noise
is thought to be by far the most likely cause, and this is
where motorcycling comes in.
Without getting too deep into anatomical detail, loud
and continued noise has a damaging effect on the path-
way of thousands of hair cells (called cilia) in the inner
ear. The wafting of these tiny receptor hairs is essential
to the transmission of external sound signals to the
auditory nerve and hence to the brain which, without
the signal, seems to make up sounds for itself. These
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