- As a fellow producer and DJ, I recently took a trip to the ENT and Audiologist. I'm sure all of us worry a bit about our ears, so I wanted to share my experience so you can make more informed decisions!
- I sometimes put my ears in situations they shouldn't be, normally loud club environments, but what did me in wasn't music-related: it was an insanely loud NYC restaurant, with no sound absorbency. I took out my DB-reader on my iPhone and it was averaging 100DB, with regular spikes as high as 110. A few hours later, I left and my head sort of hurt, and the next morning my ears were painful - no ringing (tinnitus) thank goodness, but physical pain. After a full week of unrelieved pain, I decided it was time to see a specialist.
- The ENT doctor was great - after a brief discussion, he looked at my ears, removed some wax (a painless, easy and fast activity), and then sent me to the audiologist.
- The audiologist was also great - she used a little machine that puffs air on my ear drums (also painless) and determined that there was an appropriate amount of pressure on both sides of the drums. Then, she put me in a sound isolation chamber and put special 'earbuds' in my ears, and I pressed a button whenever I could hear a faint noise. This took about 5 minutes, but at the end she provided me with an absolute amazing chart of each ear's response level for different frequencies. If you use Ableton, it looked identical to 'EQ8', but unfortunately the left ear chart has a little 'notch' where my ear wasn't responding as well in a certain range.
- After consulting with the doctor, he told me that after sound damage occurs, typically the best response is to take steroids to reduce inflammation. You have 2 weeks after the incident to begin a course of oral steroids, or up to 4 weeks to have a direct injection through the ear drum. While we don't know 100% for sure that the 'notch' was caused by this specific incident (he thought it might be because when I DJ, I do it mostly through the left ear-cup), we both agreed that a regime of oral steroids to ameliorate the ongoing swelling from the ear pain would be a good course of action.
- I'll be returning to the audiologist in 2 weeks to get a follow-up hearing test, and hopefully my symptoms will have improved!
- TL;dr - if you have hearing damage, see a doctor ASAP, because you have a 2 week fuse to start the best course of treatment.
Submitted June 27, 2017 at 09:44AM by mroctopus https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/comments/6jsf5u/my_trip_to_the_ent_and_audiologist_related_to_ear/?utm_source=ifttt