I suppose that we at MQIMQI get up to a dozen emails a day spruiking cures for Tinnitus or ringing in the ears. Rightly or wrongly we are just dismissing them as junk. Perhaps we shouldn’t be.
A GP once told me something that made me laugh – he suffers from it himself but he’s got so used to it that the only time he notices it is when one of his patients asks, “Doc, what can I do about the ringing in my ears?”
To us it raises a question which is increasingly puzzling – why is there not a better system than we have at present. There must be one or two or three people in the whole world who know more about Tinnitus than anyone else – why can’t we as patients access their knowledge, as the internet makes so possible, wherever they are. The present system is based around us as patients lining up to have face to face consultations with people in the hope that almost by good luck rather than good management we may stumble across someone who knows what they are talking about. It’s indescribably primitive – we are just a likely to end up talking to someone who doesn’t even know what to do about their own Tinnitus, like the GP referred to above.