Whoosh goes the bruit, into the MR scanner goes the patient
It’s the maddening malady you’ve never heard of unless you hear it inside your head every day and nobody else can hear it yet it’s so loud to you that you can actually record it.
Seriously.
“It” would be the condition called pulsatile tinnitus. It’s not really a form of tinnitus, the common source of ringing in the ears, and it turns out a community of patient advocates is banding together for support and action.
One aim of both those activities is steering sufferers toward imaging, especially MRI, since “many cases are fixable, often by a catheter-based procedure and occasionally by surgery,” reports Joyce Cohen of the online outlet STAT.
“It’s important to make sure you have pulsatile tinnitus before getting an MRI,” Cohen adds parenthetically, “because the noisy scan can be dangerously loud for patients with regular tinnitus.”
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Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.