Listening to loud music in night clubs or through your headphones over a long period of time. This bad habit of exposing your ears to such loud sounds and decibels has become a real problem for some people over the years. British TV star Jamie Laing, best known for his appearance in the TV show Made in Chelsea, has first-hand experience of just this.
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A piercing buzzing
It all started suddenly in the middle of the night while he was sleeping. A piercing buzzing sound suddenly woke Jamie Laing from his slumber and prevented him from falling asleep again. Thinking maybe an alarm was going off somewhere, he went to search for the source of the buzzing. As the young man told the Daily Mail:
‘The noise sounded like a static buzz of a television in another room. Once I’d started to hear it, the constant humming remained in my head.’
He felt like he was turning his entire house upside down, but was however unable to find the source of the sound. Then he suddenly realised that the sound must have been in his head because after all, he heard it everywhere he went.
His suspicions were then confirmed
The next day, he went to see a doctor because he was worried, who then confirmed his suspicions. Jamie was suffering from tinnitus, a buzzing in his ears which can be caused by excessive noise, hearing loss, but also by diseases in the cervical spine or deformities in the jaw, as various medical websites explain.
In his case, the doctor realised that his ears had been damaged by years of listening to excessively loud music and other noises. To be more precise, it was caused by the multiple concerts he had attended without wearing hearing protection and by spending hours listening to music that was too loud through his headphones. His symptoms have been classified as chronic tinnitus. In an Instagram video, he admitted that he has been suffering from this for four years now.
Tinnitus is a symptom
The problem is that tinnitus is a symptom and not a disease, as Dr John Phillips explains, so the ringing in his ears cannot be treated. There are only treatments that help you get used to the annoying sounds so that they are easier for you to deal with and bear.
‘The most common cause is hearing loss - the less you can hear externally, the more you will hear internally as your brain turns up its central volume dial, meaning that you hear things that you wouldn’t normally hear.’
It has been said that around 1 in 3 people experience tinnitus at some point in their lives and stress and psychological problems can also cause this buzzing to occur. There is a distinction between acute tinnitus, which is when it occurs for the first time, and chronic tinnitus when someone has been experiencing it for around three months.
