Hearing loss and thyroid medication: Is there a connection?

Julie, addition to list of ototoxic meds...

It's important to know if the med the doc proposes to use on you is one of the "families" of meds on the list. Not all individual meds are listed. Whenever anything is being prescribed to combat infection, check the list and look up the drug on the 'net to see if it's one of the "families" of meds not listed individually.

The list doesn't contain a med commonly prescribed for dogs, gentamicin. (It IS an aminoglycoside antibiotic, just not individually listed.) It used to be widely used for humans, caused lots of deafness. Before I was aware of its side effects, we had a golden retriever who had frequent ear infections (common in dogs with ear "flaps" that hang down that also love swimming). By the time he was 10, he had obviously lost hearing, and I knew by then that gent is a bad drug for hearing and, worse, balance. He also had all the symptoms we Menierians have: near total loss of useful balance with nystagmus (eyeballs rolling around in unusual and alarming ways). I don't think that gent is used much these days for either humans or dogs due to its extreme ototoxicity, but some vets still use it. Much more recently, one tried to prescribe gent for my lab's ear infection; fortunately, I knew that was a bad idea and was able to convince her to prescribe another antibiotic.

Lots of people lost hearing during the early days of antibiotics, which were a near miracle at the time, saved many lives. I did a book project where the author/photographer was nearly deaf due to an antibiotic used in the very early days to save her life. We used to sit around a table with the committee from the non-profit paying to have the book published, both of us hearing impaired, feeding each other hints from time to time. By that time, she had been nearly deaf for decades, so was far better at speech reading than I was, but I sometimes heard things she couldn't--quite a pair! The book's title was "Celilo Falls: Remembering Thunder"--hilarious because neither of us had ever actually HEARD the falls, just felt the thunder with our feet!

I get emails from HLAA. And signed up to Zoom thru them. I don’t work so I haven’t used the app and wondered how the captions appear. I will ask a friend to start a meeting to see if we can get it to work. Thanks for that tip. And thanks for all updated info in this area.

reply to happy2bhere re lack of video captions:

These days, we can no longer simply buy Adobe's Creative Suite, which used to cost a mere $1,600 or so...we have to rent it for $60/mo., which is $720 /year...forever, or at least until the raise the monthly charge! The swell new software has eliminated many of the things most of used every day, but there's no after-market manual to buy to learn all the tricks of the new software to simply do what we used to do easily. Instead, Adobe provides videos...without captions, of course. It's just not possible to follow the video, figure out what's being said, and learn. I've complained to Adobe, without result so far.