Tinnitus is the medical term for ringing in the ears, which may be high or low pitch. Subjectively it can be all sorts of noises for patients. It has been described as anywhere from drumming sounds to noises of the sea based on what I've been told. Sometimes if I sleep too late I get it too, for me it is a temporary high pitch screech that isn't too loud which feels like it shuts off the hearing of the affected ear for a few seconds. However pulsatile tinnitus is a special form of tinnitus which involves the hearing of the heartbeat inside the ear from the patients that have told me. It is subjectively worse than regular tinnitus because from cases I've encountered it is 24/7 and people cannot sleep at all. In the past I've encountered people who said it is due to structural anomalies in the neck bones causing turbulence in the blood flow to the ear as a result of blood vessel issues in the neck. Granted, anything that is pulsatile should have some relation to the blood flow to the area, at least according to Chinese Medicine. Tinnitus in Chinese Medicine is largely a phenomenon of what we call "branch excess, root deficiency". It means, you cannot get tinnitus unless you are constitutionally weakened. The tinnitus problem is a reflection of innate deficiency. This happens typically only in older people, but can happen to younger people who are overtaxed physically and mentally, or under long term stress without proper rest---which leads to what Chinese Medicine calls "fire". There is another type where people get this problem from loud noises, which is possible nerve or physical damage to the structures inside the ear (noises cause vibrations in the eardrum which transmit pulse waves to the nerves that go to the brain for the wave/vibration to be interpreted as 'noise'), which is treated differently, although such patients typically have similar constitutions as well coincidentally. It is interesting because these individuals are naturally subject to the conditions which lead to such sudden bursts of noise---people who go loud concerts usually do not sleep early, leading to the a preexiting state of deficiency that sets them up for tinnitus when they attend a loud concert late in the evening, or people who work with loud machines are usually already physically taxed before hand so that they more easily develop tinnitus if they don't use proper ear protection at work. It is a very interesting observation of cause and effect actually. So in Chinese Medicine you have to strengthen the constitution of the patient in order to treat the root cause of the problem. It is not an easy problem to treat however, as it is quite obstinate and responds only in a gradual manner. I have thus come to think that there is possibly an innate cause from the blood vessel pathology of the vessels going into the ear, similar to plaque that builds up in the carotid arteries on the front which causes head issues later on. But based on experience, it does improve with acupuncture and herbs as long as the patient is willing to have some patience.
Ulcerative colitis is a debilitating condition that is chronic and life-sapping. The inflammation of the gut leads to frequent bowel movements in a single day, upwards of 15 from what I've encountered, and the stool is not even stool, but mainly pus, foam, froth and blood. You can imagine the gut is being tattered from the inside and the things that come out is the result of this inflammatory injury. Were it not for the fact that it tends to go through waves of remission and flareups, nobody could realistically withstand this. Patients frequently lose a lot of weight in a flareup episode that last many days to over a week. Nobody knows why it happens but it has close ties to stress and emotional issues. Occasionally it is caused by unhygiene food, but at least from the people that I've seen none of them know why they got it. Life is a mystery in many regards and so is many diseases. This is no different. Colitis is also interesting because it highlights the difference between how problems are viewed from Chinese Medicine and Western Medicine. Western medicine treats colitis with steroids, but in Chinese Medicine colitis patients, at least the ones that came to see me, mostly do not have 'fire'. It is really odd, because despite them running to the bathroom multiple times in a day, with mucous and blood, the body isn't telling me there is 'fire' or 'inflammation'. In fact, the body is telling me it cannot hold stool, so much so that the lining sloughs off and bleeds. Granted, this might be a result of the steroids that patients are typically on. Interesting recently I had a patient who was actually doing better and improving with my treatments using acupuncture and herbs because the patient's current medication was apparently not strong enough to control it as it was a low dose. When just about the patient was showing signs of improvement with TCM, the MD prescribed a much stronger dose of steroids that for some reason caused the situation to worsen, which technically should not be the case, or at the least, it should not make things worse. Unfortunately as much as I would like it, Chinese Medicine is not mainstream medicine, and while I would like to have ability to prescribe tests and imaging to keep track of treatment progress, I am held hostage by the slow and inefficient system in Canada, and the lack of freedom for patients to have imaging and tests done without having to go through medical bureaucracy. Alas, even though colitis does respond to treatment, but in chronic cases, things are complicated because there is an nuanced interplay between alternative medicine and mainstream medicine.