News

Tense Muscles of Mastication May Cause Ringing in the Ears

People who perceive a constant noise without any acoustic source suffer from tinnitus. As a possible cause, medical experts discussed a defective position of the inner ear, assumedly precipitated by damage caused by noise exposure. Experts did not give a recovery much of a chance.

Today many people suffer from tinnitus. However, recent discoveries have given the cause of this physical and mental strain a name: tense muscles of mastication. A consultation of your local dentist may help diagnose and produce relief for the rattling, fizzling, and booming in your ears.

Most patients do not even know about the interrelatedness between their tinnitus and muscles of mastication. As the distance between the inner ear and the jaw joint is just a few millimeters, a correlation between this and the noise you hear stands to reason. Poor coping strategies with stress in your job, family, or elsewhere can cause teeth grinding. This, in turn, makes your muscles of mastication increasingly tense. The hardening of muscles, along with the putting of the jaw joint under undue stress, may affect the inner ear in a way that makes you hear the typical, maddening noise.

Not just teeth grinding, but also a defective position of the jaw may have adverse effects on your acoustic organ. Pressure can damage the hair cells inside your inner ear. Through constant noise, these hair cells might die off, making you hear the annoying sound associated with tinnitus. Other dental problems may cause tinnitus as well, which strongly suggests that a treatment by your dentist or orthodontist might produce relief.

The European Health Insurance Card

As of 2006, the electronically readable health insurance card has been gradually introduced to European countries.

German panel patients can now have a European health insurance card issued. Supposed to render an unbureaucratic, medical treatment possible, the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) sets European-wide features to ensure in cases of emergencies the implementation of standardized terms and conditions. These are applicable in member states of the EU plus Island, Norway, Lichtenstein, and Switzerland. Now your local health insurer reimburses the costs of treatment.

Additionally, the holder's emergency data is supposed to be stored on the EHIC. As an option, information containing information about the holder's relatives, friends, or preferences concerning the doctors to be contacted in the first place may be retained for further use.

The relative limitless storage room for data can be used effectively to save information about your personal health condition, emergency data, medicinal records, past operations, and therapies.

Pros:
Any time and anywhere in Europe, a doctor will be able to revert to the data, make a diagnosis very quickly, and commence the appropriate treatment.

Since the bill will be sent directly to his or her local health insurer, the patient does not have to provide up-front services.

Cons:
As in cases of emergency the patient's private identification number is not required for accessing the data, malpractice cannot be prevented.

Below you will find a list of downloadable brochures containing up-to-date information about the EHIC.

For more information:

E-mail: info@bmg.bund.de
Phone 01805/278 5271 (0.12 Euro per minute)
Fax 01805/278 5272 (0.12 Euro per minute)
Services for the Deaf and Hearing Impaired:
Text phone 01805 / 99 66 07 (0.12 Euro per minute)
Department of Health
Public Relations
11055 Berlin

Most People Wear Contact Lenses without Complications

The vast majority of people requiring vision correction wishes to do without glasses. However, many of them still hesitate to turn to contact lenses out of fear that they might somehow harm their eyes. Nevertheless, these fears are unfounded as with the proper lenses you cannot be wrong. (Article from November 22, 2006)

In the beginning, the question arises as to whether soft or hard lenses would be the best choice. As a rule, hard lenses are better suited to your eyes due to their strength of shape and their smaller size, allowing the eye to be better supplied with oxygen. Though this all recommends the use of hard lenses, most people favor soft lenses for they provide better wearing comfort.

Due to a noticeable foreign body sensation that usually comes with hard lenses, the patient requires a longer initial period of adjustment. The best strategy of coping with this break-in process is to get gradually used to wearing contact lenses, with an occasional resorting to wearing your glasses.

At the onset, the wearing of hard lenses can make you feel uncomfortable. However, while your first time of wearing contacts may last up to four hours, your second trial might take as long as six hours. With most hard contact lenses, there will be a 2- to 4-week break-in period during which you wear the lenses for increasingly longer periods each day. Since they can be worn over a longer period than soft lenses, hard lenses offer a relatively low-maintenance and cost-effective way of correcting your eyesight. Some situations, such as water sports or ball games, require soft lenses, because if a ball hits you directly onto the eyes, the hard lenses will be gone.

Soft contacts stick better to the eyes and cover the whole of the iris. With that, you are able to keep your eyes open while diving. In cases of severe exposure to dust, you are better off with soft lenses. For beach vacationers day lenses are the best choice, because only a soft surface of the lenses can absorb occurring dust particles. Moreover, it is a lesser loss when soft contacts are gone missing than it is with hard ones. At springtime, hay fever sufferers may use soft lenses, as the pollen cannot get onto your eye directly. This does not mean that hay fever sufferers will have lesser problems when wearing soft contacts. In cases of eye irritation, they should wear no contact lenses at all. If acute problems with your eyes, such as conjunctivitis, occur, you should abandon the lenses for this period of illness.

Because today new technologies have made possible lenses for every conceivable situation, only few persons with ametropic visions need to abstain from wearing contact lenses. As contact lenses require a tear film to adhere to the iris, people with dry eyes used to be discouraged from wearing them. Today new materials have solved his problem.

Before any initial wearing, one needs to have adjusted both soft and hard contact lenses to the eyes of the wearer. Badly fitted lenses may cause scarring on the outer layer of the eye. After that, wearing contacts will no longer be possible. Therefore, you should consult an eye specialist twice a year to make sure that there is no hazard to your eye. For those ordering their lenses via the internet, the seller will neither offer nor support these eye-saving consultations.

No-Scalpel Surgery - the Latest Rage

Surgical interventions without the surgeon's knife certainly pose lesser risks to the patient. Therefore, in cosmetic surgery you can recognize an increasing trend towards treatments without scalpel. (Article from November 22, 2006)

However, most newly developed devices will enter the market not before two to three years. Promising to make your fad pads vanish, they use the latest in laser and ultrasonic technologies. Two of the more widespread health problems are spider veins and varices. Data shows that every second or third person at the age of 45 to 55 is meanwhile suffering from one of these illnesses. Since they block the blood flow to the heart and brain, 15 to 20 percent of the people affected by varicose veins need to undergo an operation. Spider veins, on the other hand, are a purely cosmetic issue. There also exists no approved treatment for cellulites, which is a great topic among women who take an interest in their body.

Now, there is no sufficiently sound therapy for an enduring healing of cellulites. One of the positive aspects is a new generation of laser-run devices, but they are yet in an early stage of clinical approval.

Fix subsidies for dentures for cumpulsory insured persons

Since January 2005 compulsory insured people in Germany are entitled to get fix subsidies according to their medical results (§ 55 SGB V) with regards to the supply of dentures within the European Union (bridges, crowns, dentures, implants). This revision replaces the previous legal situation according to which the compulsory health insurance paid a percentage participation of the costs for dentures. Thus it is made sure that compulsory insured persons can choose any form of supply of dentures without losing their entitlement to fix subsidies. This also applies for implant dentures. The subsidy amounts to 50% of the costs of the regular supply.
Should the patient (e.g. with an existing gap between the teeth) choose an implant instead of a bridge, the fix subsidy will be paid, too. Therefore the patient can choose for himself which sort (quality) of material and treatment should be used without losing his entitlement to fix subsidies.

Entitlement to benefits for compulsory insured people

Compulsory insured people have, with regards to certain medical results, an entitlement to:

• fix dentures (bridges, partial crowns, crowns)
• combined dentures (combination of fixed and removabledentures)
• removable dentures (part/total dentures)
• restoration (extension and repairs on existing dentures)

Bonus rulings

The bonus rulings remain in place. If the patient can prove that control examinations have been carried out annually within the last five years, the fix subsidy increases to a further 20%. If he proves it for the last ten years, it increases even to a further 30%.

Supply within EU memberstates

When "providers of services" (that is dentist practices and clinics) are within the geographical purview of EU law, there is an entitlement towards the health insurance companies to reimbursement of fix subsidies according to medical results.