healthmedicinet

“I wonder how you’re feeling
There’s ringing in my ears
And no one to relate to ‘cept the sea…”
— Peter Frampton

There are few afflictions as constant and annoying as tinnitus, which Wikipedia defines as: “The hearing of sound when no external sound is present. While often described as a ringing, it may also sound like a clicking, hiss or roaring. Most of the time, it comes on gradually. In some people, the sound causes depression, anxiety or interferes with concentration.”

It is a surprisingly common condition with chronic tinnitus affecting 5 to 10 percent of the U.S. adult population, with about 0.5 percent having severe, debilitating tinnitus. Below is a list of ten famous people through history who suffered from tinnitus, with a common denominator seeming to exist and among performers, particularly actors and musicians.

1. Ronald Reagan

The two-term President of the United States began his career as an actor, largely in B-movies and westerns, and it was during one of the latter that a blank pistol was fired too close to his ear, afflicting him with tinnitus for the rest of his life.

2. Steve Martin

Another victim of show biz-related hearing loss, Martin has suffered from tinnitus since filming a gunfight on set of his comedy Three Amigos, in 1986. “You just get used to it,” Martin said.

3. Pete Townsend

In one of rock music’s most infamous, and ill-conceived pranks, Keith Moon was already in the habit of placing an explosive charge in one his two bass drums to detonate during Pete Townshend’s guitar-smashing at the end of each Who performance. But for their September 17, 1967 Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour appearance, Moon packed several times the normal amount of explosives into his drum kit, and when he set it off, a gigantic explosion rocked the set as a cloud of white smoke engulfed Townshend and singer Roger Daltrey. Though bassist John Entwistle never lost his cool, Daltrey practically flew downstage and when Townshend emerged from the smoke, his hair was almost literally blown to one side of his head, and would continue to lose his hearing, to the point of near-deafness, over time.

4. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy

The Star Trek icons were both injured during the filming of the episode Arena, in 1967, when they stood too close to a special effects explosion, each suffering from tinnitus from then on.

5. Jeff Beck

Another musical sufferer after years of playing live in front of massive amplifiers: “Yes, it’s in my left ear. It’s excruciating… I mean, it’s the worst thing ’cause it’s not… It never… It does go away – it’s not true to say that it doesn’t but, uhh… It doesn’t… The doctors say it won’t… It isn’t actually going away – you’ve just gotta suppress… They try to come to terms with what it actually… Why some people fear it – that’s the psychology behind it. They know it’s there but why is it such a horrible sound? Well, you can say why is a guy scratching at a window with his nails such a horrible sound – I couldn’t put up with that! This is worse!”

6. Bono

U2’s legendary frontman not only sings about it in the band’s lyrics, the former Paul Hewson derived his name from a hearing aid store in his hometown of Dublin, Ireland which had a sign that read ‘Bonavox Hearing Aids’.

7. John Densmore

The former drummer for The Doors has suffered from the condition for years. Bandmate Ray Manzarek says that things are looking grim for Densmore, in terms of his future as a musician: “Tinnitus, man, you can’t…You know, there’s nothing you can do about it. It doesn’t get better. It can only get worse–that’s the hell of that thing. You’d say, ‘Well, you know, when it’s better, you’re gonna play, man.’ Well, it doesn’t get better. The nature of that problem is that it can only get worse.”

8. Liza Minnelli

Liza Minnelli claims that she developed tinnitus after her father screamed loudly in her ear, excited that Minnelli just won an Academy Award for her performance in Cabaret. However, in the clip above, she doesn’t seem too upset by it.

9. Alan Shepard

One of NASA’s original Mercury astronauts portrayed in the book and film The Right Stuff, Alan Shepard was already a national hero in 1964 whenn he and fellow astronaut Frank Borman were training for the first Gemini flight. Suddenly, Shepard suffered a severe setback: he contracted Meniere’s disease, an inner-ear ailment which causes deafness, tinnitus and loss of balance. Shepard had surgery to fix the condition, so that he could command the Apollo 14 moon flight, which he did later with flying colors.

10. Vincent Van Gough

It is rumored that Vincent van Gogh cut his ear off as a response to a particularly bad episode of tinnitus. “A review of 796 personal letters to family and friends written between 1884 and his suicide in 1890 reveals a man constantly in control of his reason and suffering from severe repeated attacks of disabling vertigo, not a seizure disorder,” claimed a group writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1990. Van Gogh’s “bizarre behavior suggests that his tinnitus had become intolerable and that he felt he might alleviate the ‘auditory hallucinations’ by eliminating their source. Some patients with Meniere’s disease experience such overwhelming tinnitus that they would ‘cut off their ear’ or ‘poke a hole in it with an ice pick’ to try to relieve it.”