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The "Butterfly's Whisper" Blog

Welcome to my blog. I hope by sharing my own misophonia experiences, others who are frustrated with misophonia sensitivities will discover that they're not alone. I also hope that people who may not have misophonia will gain some insight about what it's like to have this condition.

Please feel free to post any comments or use the "Contact Us" page if you have any questions/comments you don't want to post online.

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New misophonia articles...

3/2/2015

2 Comments

 
Last week I learned of a new NY Times article on misophonia that was written by a doctor who has misophonia. (he following is a link to the article, but BE FOREWARNEDBE FOR... They included a video with the online article that starts off with the noise of a person chewing popcorn. When I hunted down the article online to forward to my boss and a few coworkers who knew of my condition, I heard the crunching of popcorn and popped my head over the cubicle wall thinking it was my adjacent coworker. How embarrassed did I feel when I realized the sound was coming through my earbud that was laying next to my keyboard. (Thank goodness I hadn't said anything to my coworker.) The article is here:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/23/please-stop-making-that-noise/?_r=0

A friend of mine back in Maryland who also suffers from misophonia told me about an article in the Washington Post back in December. She was very upset at the article because one of the audiologists interviewed stated that in his opinion, misophonia is a conditioned response. Unfortunately, when my friend wrote a letter to the Washington Post, it was ignored. Although I am sharing a link to the article below, I also disagree with the premise of the article - especially since the doctor goes on to talk about how "... This impulse has to do with how the brain processes sound."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/misophonia-is-a-newly-identified-condition-for-people-hypersensitive-to-sound/2014/12/01/7c392782-69ba-11e4-a31c-77759fc1eacc_story.html

So many articles like that one focus on the sound aspect of misophonia yet ignore the fact that many misophonia sufferers, like myself,  are also triggered by certain visual and tactile sensations as well.  I think this is due to the fact that audiologists were the first medical practitioners to acknowledge misophonia as a real condition.

Despite the name "misophonia," I believe the condition extends well beyond the auditory system. Hopefully when the fMRI misophonia study in which I participated last year at a neurology hospital in London is published, medical practitioners beyond audiologists will be willing to invest more research and attention to the misophonia condition as a whole, not just the aural component of it.
2 Comments
Jackie
3/4/2015 08:24:16 am

I related to what you wrote, in that I also have misophonia that includes not only auditory stimuli, but visual, tactile and olfactory. I believe there is a big neurological component, but also think conditioning may play a part, possibly in the earliest stages of misophonia. My misophonia started with sound, particularly with the eating sounds my father made, but over 50-plus years has worsened to include all kinds of other stimuli.

Reply
Emlyn
3/8/2015 07:00:00 am

Hi, Jackie. Thanks for the comment. I don't disagree with you. I think our experiences in life affect a lot of our overall well-being.

I just disagree with doctors who think that the cause of misophonia is conditional. My worry when doctors do that is they think this condition is all in a sufferer's head, when in actuality (in my opinion), there is a physiological cause that is exasperated by stress in a person's life. I may have had major traumas in my life, but I had misophonia symptoms even before those occured. Also, some sufferers didn't experience traumas like the ones I had.

Hopefully, one day enough research will have been done to give answers to so many unknowns about this condition. :-)

Reply



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    About the Author

    Emlyn Altman has been suffering with misophonia for over 35 years, even though she only found out about the actual medical condition much more recently. As frustrating as the condition has been over the years, her heightened sensitivities across all the senses considerably influenced her talents within the visual fine arts (particularly sculpture), music (singing, piano, and many other instruments), writing, and culinary backgrounds, as well as professional achievements as an architectural lighting designer. Her goal in developing this website is to promote more awareness about misophonia and help other sufferers as well.


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