Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: You're listening to the Doc Lounge Podcast. This is a place for candid conversations with the healthcare industry's top physicians, executives and thought leaders.
This podcast is made possible by Pacific Companies, your trusted advisor in physician recruitment.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Today on the Doc Lounge, we're exploring a topic that doesn't get nearly enough attention in the longevity and performance world. Hearing health. Our guest is Dr. Ben Thompson, audiologist and founder of Treble Health. Dr. Thompson has helped more than 5,000 patients improve their hearing and overcome tinnitus using an evidence based, yet biohacker friendly approach that blends cognitive techniques, sound therapy, and the latest innovations in hearing technology.
His work goes beyond improving hearing. It's about enhancing focus, reducing stress, and protecting long term brain health.
With hearing loss now recognized as a major risk factor for dementia and even called Brian Johnson's worst biomarker, this conversation couldn't be more relevant. Dr. Thompson also leads a global community of over 150,000 followers on YouTube where he shares practical tools and insights to help people take control of their hearing and cognitive performance.
Ben, welcome to the Doc Lounge. We're so excited to have you here.
[00:01:21] Speaker C: Thank you, Stacey. Great to be here.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: This is. Yeah, this is such a timely topic. I mean, I've been hearing more and more about how hearing loss and your ability and kind of your. The quality of sound is related to dementia. So tell us a little bit about that. I know that's a hot topic right now.
[00:01:40] Speaker C: Yeah. One of the biggest motivators for my patients is keeping their brain healthy. And even though my domain or my niche is tinnitus, ear ringing and hearing loss, you know, lack of hearing people, clearly cognition is such an important connection between those. And I like to communicate with my patients and say we want to make sure your brain lives as long as your body, you know, healthy cognition reducing the risk of cognitive decline or dementia. So there, there is some interesting research connecting these different things. Hearing loss, tinnitus, cognition. So excited to get into that with you today.
[00:02:19] Speaker B: Okay, tell us, bring us back a bit. How did you decide to get into audiology and specialize on that when you were first, you know, becoming a doctor and a resident?
[00:02:29] Speaker C: It's a family affair. So I come from a family of audiologists and speech therapists. The speech and hearing worlds are pretty close. My mom's a speech therapist and my older brother is also an audiologist.
[00:02:42] Speaker B: I love that. So it's all in the family.
That's so cool. Well, tell us a little bit about.
A lot of people think that hearing loss and issues is just something associated with age. But I know a lot of your work is highlighting that it can really affect anybody at any stage of life. Tell us a little bit more about that.
[00:03:04] Speaker C: A lot of people who first develop tinnitus earrings, they're. It can really affect them a lot with anxiety, stress, insomnia. And those conditions can have a lot of downstream negative health effects for people. So this. Both of these conditions with the ears are actually invisible. So you walk on the street, you can't tell if someone has hearing loss unless you notice them having to ask to repeat themselves, or you can see they're maybe wearing hearing aids or something. With tinnitus, you also can't tell if someone is dealing with this constant loud ringing or hissing sound in their ears or their head, similar to anxiety or depression. You know, you walk down the street, you just don't know who has these conditions. So a surprisingly large percentage of the American population has some degree of significant tinnitus. It's estimated to be about 10%.
So people are often shocked when I speak with, say I'm meeting a couple at a dinner party or something, and the husband will say, oh, yeah, I have tinnitus. It's kind of. It kind of annoys me. I have it a lot. And the wife will go, you never talk about that.
So these are important, but kind of hidden or forgotten health conditions in the general health world.
[00:04:24] Speaker B: What does.
How can someone be screened? Or how can somebody learn what their current levels are of hearing?
[00:04:32] Speaker C: Yeah, hearing test. And then asking oneself these questions. You know, do I hear ringing or hissing sounds when I'm in a quiet room?
Am I noticing that I'm having difficulty hearing people at work or hearing my spouse at home when he or she is in the other room? Those are early signs where we might say you have some symptoms of tinnitus or hearing loss. Let's have you come into our clinic or one of our clinics at tribal health and test your hearing and then decide what to do if anything from there.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: Okay, tell us a little bit. Once that's been, you know, diagnosed, how are you really helping, you know, your patients, you know, that are struggling with this? What. What does treatment look like today?
[00:05:17] Speaker C: Yeah. So I'll start with tinnitus, which.
The main message I have for everyone listening, especially physicians, is that there is something we can do for these patients.
It's common that a patient will go to an ENT clinic and speak with a physician. They're hoping that's the person will solve their problem. But unfortunately they're told, look, there's nothing much I can do for you. You just have to kind of get used to it or learn to live with it.
And the mechanism of why tinnitus becomes a problem for a lot of people, it's that the nervous system is almost hypersensitive or it's out of balance.
So that can create this fight or flight response with anxiety and stress. Going to that doctor's appointment and then being told there's nothing you can do is literally the worst news that these patients have ever heard. So what's missing there is, hey, even though, just like other serious health conditions, a lot of them actually, even though there's no complete cure for this, bring it to zero.
Let's say someone has an 8 out of 10 problem with this ringing in their ears. Hey, actually a lot of patients, when they follow the right plan and protocol, they can bring this down to a mild level, a very manageable level. And there's millions of people that have mild tenesis that are living normal lives just fine. So that's the message, the, the gap that physicians need to hear. That small tweak with counseling or education can make a big difference for these patients and get them on the right track. What does treatment look like for tinnitus, you ask Stacy?
Yeah, there's two main pillars which patients typically do simultaneously to get the best results. One is a sound based treatment using something called sound therapy. And the second is a cognitive or more psychological based treatment.
When both of those work together, then slowly but surely, month by month, the patient can reduce the tinnitus level in their brain. So it's a type of brain retraining that works with the limbic system, the psychology centers of the brain, as well as the autonomic nervous system. The brain essentially learns over time that, hey, this sound that it's amplifying, this phantom sound that it's making, louder and more intrusive, the brain can over time realize, oh, that's actually a, not a non threatening sound. It's actually a benign body sensation.
Actually, I can put it in the bucket. The brain, the subconscious brain decides I can put it in the bucket of. It's not an important signal for Ben to pay attention to. Just like the sound of my breathing always going endlessly, always, you know, it's always there, or the beat of my heartbeat always there. The body can filter out these sensations so that they reduce their awareness significantly. And often the volume of tinnitus goes down over time too.
So that's the best treatment. It often uses devices on the ears like sound Therapy devices or hearing aids program, specifically for tinnitus. There's other protocols as well, including tinnitus retraining therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy for tinnitus, as well as bimodal stimulation. So those are the approaches for tinnitus treatment today.
[00:08:29] Speaker B: Well, I appreciate you going over that, because I've heard of a lot of cases where it can get so severe that it can lead to depression, even suicidal thoughts, because it's getting to a point where it's just unmanageable for patients. So I think your message is there is treatment, and there you just have to be, you know, connected with the right physician, like yourself. Audiologists, I'm assuming, is kind of the specialty that they would want to look for to make sure that they're connecting with someone like you that could, you know, really offer them the proper care.
[00:09:03] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So back in 2021, the Texas Roadhouse founder Kent Taylor actually actually died and committed suicide. And partly it was thought that it was due to experiencing symptoms related to Covid as, including severe tinnitus. So even someone who, you know, has a lot of money and a lot of resources went through just a horrible thing. So when things like that happen, people start to realize, oh, this might be a lot more serious than I thought. And for a lot of these patients, it is the worst health problem they've ever dealt with.
So, yeah, physicians out there just know that there are people like me who specialize in. In this that can absolutely help these people and, you know, put a lot of time and energy into getting them better.
[00:09:50] Speaker B: Well, I know you've helped over 5,000 patients through trouble health. So tell us, are there patterns that you're seeing, you know, that people are usually getting wrong when it's coming, when it comes to protecting or improving their hearing?
[00:10:04] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a great question.
So how do people keep their ears in the best place?
There's. There's kind of prevention, and then there's being proactive once you already have a condition. So for people that don't have any of these conditions yet, you know, thank God wearing earplugs protects your hearing.
I run a podcast. I speak with hundreds of researchers and scientists in the. In the hearing field. There was an interesting perspective someone shared where they. They said modern hearing research might be showing us that it's not only the aging process that makes our ears worse, that actually a big part of it might just be the cumulative noise exposure we experience over many years of life.
So that's an interesting thought, because we might. We might have thought in the, I thought in the past, oh, that's just, you know, age related hearing loss. Well, is it age that's causing the hearing loss or is it noise exposure during my year, years that I'm living that's causing the hearing loss?
To be determined. TBD on that. But regardless, it's showing us, hey, let's protect our hearing, because this actually might be more in control than we think. And if we can keep our hearing in a good place, that may have results of keeping our cognition and our cognitive health in the best place possible too. So protecting your hearing with earplugs, if you're around loud noises, power tools, going to concerts, using, using equipment, things of that sort, gunfire, things like that.
If you already have some hearing loss, if you already have some tinnitus, then for tinnitus, my recommendations would be focus on a healthy nervous system, focus on holistic health like sleep, keeping stress levels in check, having some ways to regulate the nervous system.
Um, tinnitus is almost a barometer of the nervous system. So someone who is a busy CEO and was going through a really challenging period, they might have a spike in their tinnitus. It gets louder. If they're, you know, in the Caribbean on vacation, they don't hear it at all. So that's an example of keeping your nervous system and sleep in order. And that can prevent this condition from getting worse. And keep it in check with hearing.
And with someone who has a hearing loss issue, they're noticing, hey, things aren't so clear in my work meetings. I can't hear my spouse that well at home, people are starting to mumble or I'm having trouble in restaurants.
Then someone should get a comprehensive hearing test at a clinic like ours at Tribal Health to assess, hey, how bad is this problem? Are you a candidate for treatment? Most commonly, the treatment there would be hearing devices that are well programmed to match someone's needs and someone's listening problems. That's a good sample of these different issues and what someone can do about them.
[00:13:02] Speaker B: Okay, thank you. So tell us a little bit about.
I know there's different hearing devices now, and some of them are very different than what historically people think about.
So can you tell us a little bit about that?
[00:13:16] Speaker C: Yeah. Some of them use AI. Some of them actually have bio tracking inside of them. So these are not, you know, your grand, your grandfather's hearing aids by any means.
The AI functions are primarily. So let's imagine you, Stacy, are in a restaurant. It's hard to hear people.
Then let's imagine your hearing is actually 30% worse than it used to be. So you're in a challenging situation and you add on a deficit or a handicap on top of that.
So AI in hearing aids can do a great job at focusing your hearing what's going in through your ears on the person that you're looking at based on where your head is moved. It can also do a great job at reducing background noise so that you can hear the signal a significant amount better than the background noise.
So creating what we call a signal to noise ratio allows you to hear people clearly and not struggle and spend so much mental effort following the conversation.
The bio tracking is interesting too.
There's cool things going on. Like hearing aids can track if a patient falls. So you know those old like life alert necklaces. So hearing aids can actually do that today as well where you can trigger some automations and if a fall happens, you know, send a text message to a loved one and things like that. So those are just some of the new features. Right. But most importantly, these devices are getting better and better at helping people hear clearly and understand speech as well as there's features in certain hearing aids for tinnitus relief and sound therapy.
[00:14:56] Speaker B: Oh, wow, that's. That's so cool to hear about all that. And it sounds like there's a lot of advancements there from a Czech, you know, perspective, which is really neat. And I know you often talk about, you know, your approach as being both evidence based but also biohacker. Biohacker friendly.
So is this one of the. Is this is what. Is that what you were meaning by that or tell us a little bit about that?
[00:15:18] Speaker C: Yeah, the biohacker friendly piece of it. So what I think someone who is into biohacking wants to do is keep their brain and body healthy and optimal.
I remember that I went to a dentist here in the Bay Area, San Francisco once, and they offered a free consultation for a nutritionist. And I was like, yes, that sounds awesome. I'd love to optimize where I'm at. And I went into that appointment because I work with people who have serious health problems. I went into that appointment feeling like I don't even know if I should be here taking up their time. I'm actually kind of healthy, you know. And the nutritionist was like, no, that's totally fine. You can come in feeling good and want to feel better. You don't have to just be suffering to, you know, see a doctor. And that's an example of, you know, why we want to kind of do biohacking. Or improve our health in certain ways even if we're feeling okay at a baseline.
So for someone who, let's say they have tinnitus or their considering biohacking for these, there's really not that much biohacking for hearing loss.
That's not so much really. That's more of just a physiological issue. In the cochlea, the hearing organ, there are these small cells called the stereocilia, the hair cells. They transfer the sound waves coming through the fluid in the hearing organ and they transfer that signal to electrical signal going up to the hearing nerve, the eighth cranial nerve.
There's not that much that you can really biohack there. You can't take supplements and regrow the cells in your ears for tinnitus. However, there's that brain retraining program and it's really very much related to sleep and your nervous system. So there's definitely a lot of optimization that can happen in that regard for tinnitus or people trying to reduce their tinnitus.
[00:17:11] Speaker B: Great insight there. Okay, so there is, yeah, definitely this new modern approach that you're leading and I, I, I gotta compliment you, I know you have a great following on YouTube of, you know, over 150,000 followers and you have great content on there, really bite sized and digestible. So tell anyone that's listening that wants to join the community and, and what, what they can expect.
[00:17:33] Speaker C: Yeah, so six years ago I started a YouTube channel and humble beginnings. But you know, now that channel has over 30 million views and there's a lot of people who need help with tinnitus and hearing loss. So they go to YouTube and they find some of our videos from that YouTube channel. We launched a telehealth practice and then earlier this year we also opened brick and mortar clinic. So from this YouTube channel, essentially we started a private practice for tinnitus and hearing loss. It's called Tribal health. And patients who saw us on YouTube and said wow, these guys know what they're talking about. How do I know? Get in touch with them. So we hired a team of doctors and we're, we have clinics in San Francisco, in Miami, Charlotte, North Carolina, Philadelphia and more to come. So we've really taken the interest of people who need help and they're going online and then offered services and built physical locations that they can now find us. So it's been a wild ride and just changed my life and helped a lot of people while doing it, I bet.
[00:18:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Well I, I would recommend anyone listening to obviously subscribe to your channel. So they can get all those greatest tips and learn a lot about this. Appreciate that kind of a very under, you know, it's, it's not as, there's not awareness out there around this subject. So I appreciate you coming on and you know, educating our viewers about it. And I'm assuming if, if, if somebody is really, you know, needing help and, and they're not in one of those communities, if they go to your, to the, the YouTube channel or to your website at Treble Health, they can then do the telemedicine appointment or how does that work?
[00:19:15] Speaker C: That's right. Yeah. I was a big proponent of telemedicine or telehealth all the way back to 2017 when I was at a audiology residency program at UCSF in San Francisco. I've been working on it since then, but then in 2020 with COVID and the pandemic, people actually were, you know, yes to trying it.
So if anyone's in the United States or you know, anyone, or if you're a physician listening and want to refer someone who has tinnitus to a trusted source, you can send them to our website, treblehealth.com or you can reach out to us and we'd send you some brochures to hand out to your patients. So we do complimentary telehealth, initial screenings or discovery calls with patients and then depending on what they need, we would recommend them a solution. And if that's working with us, then we'd be able to do that in telehealth or in the brick and mortar clinic as well, or a hybrid of the two, which in San Francisco, which is where I'm based, a lot of patients. You know, for example, this guy worked at Google and he said, oh, I, you know, I live 45 minutes south of the San Francisco clinic. So he's coming into the Google office in San Francisco, working for half the day, then going to the clinic and then going home and then doing the follow ups remotely. So I think that is a really amazing model for people who live in these metropolitan areas. And there's a lot of it's really using technology the way it's designed to be used, in my opinion.
[00:20:41] Speaker B: Well, I couldn't agree more and I would love for closing out just for you to share with our listeners. Maybe what's one habit that they could start doing on a day to day basis to protect their hearing and their long term cognitive performance?
[00:20:56] Speaker C: I love it. I love it. So if someone is in the older adult range and they know that they have a family history of dementia. Definitely important to test your hearing. And if you have a hearing loss, consider treatment for that. There is some possible link emerging in the research that using hearing loss treatment for someone with hearing loss and who has a family history or a risk of cognitive decline that that can slow down the rate of cognitive decline for you. So that's a really important one for, for any patients out there or physicians listening.
And then on a kind of fun level, you know, next time you go to a loud concert or you're close to the speaker, just know that every cause has an effect. And if the cause or the stimulus is loud noise, we don't want the effect to be you losing your hearing. Because right now and for the foreseeable future, we cannot regrow those hearing cells. So let's keep them healthy.
[00:22:00] Speaker B: Thank you so much, Dr. Thompson. Appreciate your time today and joining the Doc Lounge podcast.
[00:22:05] Speaker C: Thanks, Stacey. I feel like I got to lounge a bit and we got to chat. I loved it. Thanks so much for having me.
[00:22:11] Speaker A: Thank you to all of our listeners. If you would like to be notified when new episodes air, make sure to hit that subscribe button. And a big thank you to Pacific Companies. Without you guys, this podcast would not be possible.
If you would like to be a guest, Please go to www.pacificcompanies.com.
[00:22:28] Speaker B: Thank you.
