Tinnitus - do you have ringing in the ears?

Lugnut: OK, am I getting too sensitive in my dotage? Drop me an e-mail, we can discuss what we heve been listening to of late. Have a nice day.

I've deveoloped tinnitus (hopefully temporary)from a sinus infection/clogged Eustachian tubes. The ringing is at a low enough level that I've been able to ignore it. I wonder if anyone else out there has ever suffered with their Eustachian closing up? This is been ongoing for two months and am on my second ENT for treatment and am hopped up and dizzy from steriods, allegy medication and anti-biotics. This has been aggravating and has dampened my enjoyment of listening to music. The good news is that my hearing test was above average. Thanks

Design_1, I urge you to see a naturopath for your sinus infection. I had one so bad that I wanted to die. It was like my head was in a vice. After a week, I couldn't take it anymore and saw a naturopath for the first time in my life after being disgusted with the uselessness of the pharmaceutical driven "conventional medicine". He gave me accupuncture, a bottle of what he called "powerful herbs" and advised me to take vitamin C at the rate of 2g every two hours. I was feeling better in 24 hours, and was 90% better in 48 hours. If you use vitamin C in megadoses, always taper off slowly over several days, since your body will excrete it at the same rate you take it in once you are taking more than your body can use. If you get diarrhea, you're definitely taking too much, but besides that it's relatively harmless. Just reduce the dosage until it stops.

As a side note to pharmaceutical fans out there, 100,000 Americans die each year directly from "properly prescribed" pharmaceuticals. They are often a complete sham, and sometimes harmful or fatal, but they sure are profitable due to patent laws. Most doctors mean well, but they've been educated by a system owned by the pharmaceutical companies since the 1920s, so they prescribe what they know.

How about the victims of "natural" products containing ephedrine used for weight reduction? Anybody who thinks that "natural" means innocuous is mistaken. As far as I know the venom from the Black Mamba is purely "natural". Another conspiracy theorist, no doubt.

Pbb, to ridicule natural medicine is about as ridiculous an argument as anyone could make. How do you think you got here? It wasn't because we had hyper purified or synthetic medications to cure all your ancestors' ills. Most modern drugs that are effective are derived from or are synthesized versions of natural sources.

Unfortunately, compounds that provide balance and usability by the human body are often processed out of them, resulting in less effective or more highly toxic drugs. But no corporation is going to get rich promoting something that you can grow in your own garden. The capitalist system is not necessarily the most advantageous for the advancement of medicine. What's more profitable, healing the sick or maintaining their illnesses for the rest of their lives while suppressing the symptoms? I once read that, in China, doctors get paid only when you are well. Now that, if true, makes perfect sense and would be a positive feedback mechanism towards health for all, rather than the opposite which is what we have now in North America.

Any medication can be misused, I'm not saying that natural medicines are always harmless, just that they are underutilized in modern society due to economics.

"Higher doses of the concentrated synthetic analog of ephedra are still available, and in far higher doses per pill than the herbal form, as brought out by Allan Spreen, M.D. Sudafed stands for pseudo-ephedrine."

So why didn't they take Sudafed off the market? Another conspiracy theorist-theorist no doubt.