Over four years, she collected more than 2,500 signatures on an online petition to get whooshing its own medical codes - and it finally happened. “It’s a travesty that the two share a name.” “Pulsatile tinnitus is not tinnitus,” Greenwood said.
The sound isn’t a ringing, but a swishing, pulsing, or thumping that is sometimes even described as a bird flapping its wings. It often heralds a vascular condition, after all, not an auditory problem like tinnitus. They’re the most popular part of the site.Īt the heart of her activism: A quest to get whooshing (the common name is “pulsatile tinnitus”) recognized as a symptom separate from tinnitus within the medical coding system. Greenwood, who also runs a Facebook support group, encourages patients to share their stories through social media on “Whoosher Wednesdays.” And she posts recordings of people’s whooshes, which are sometimes loud enough to be captured with a smartphone. Some patients have given the T-shirts to their doctors. In a bid to raise awareness among the general public, she sells $25 “Do You Whoosh?” T-shirts, with the question mark shaped like an ear. She started a website,, with links to medical research and tips to help physicians understand the symptom. So Greenwood set out on a crusade to awaken the world to the whoosh. The pulsing sound can indicate a condition that could lead to seizure, stroke, or death. That’s a problem because whooshing can be treated - and sometimes, needs to be addressed quickly. Greenwood figured she couldn’t be alone: Many other patients hearing a whoosh had no doubt had been told they had tinnitus - for which there is no medical treatment. Her “whoosh” was, in medical terms, a “bruit” - the sound of turbulent blood flow through a narrowed vein in her brain.
It took a few months, but Greenwood finally found a doctor who understood what she was hearing and diagnosed her with a vascular condition. The sound dogging her days, by contrast, was a low-pitched rhythmic whoosh, pulsing in sync with her heartbeat. When she listened to the “sounds of tinnitus” online, they reminded her of a whistling teakettle or squealing brakes. The internet told her she had tinnitus, often called ringing in the ears. Since this is in general not a comfortable position to be in, this condition can be treated by placing a stent across the compression and thereby propping the sigmoid sinus open.Seven years ago, New York lawyer Emma Greenwood awoke to the beat of a pulse on one side of her head. If that is the case, the person usually only gets pulsatile tinnitus on one side, and not in both ears, and if the head turns to the side of the noise, by turning the chin to the shoulder, the jugular vein gets compressed and the noise goes away. If there is a compression of that sinus, then the turbulence can cause pulsatile tinnitus. The sigmoid sinus is a large vein that runs behind the ear and connects to the jugular vein in the neck. Those veins are quite big and run in the bone hence doctors refer to them as sinus. Turbulent flow can also occur when there is a narrowing in one of the veins that are carrying blood from the head back to the heart. High blood pressure can worsen the noise, and an ultrasound of the neck can diagnose this condition.
Those narrowings typically involve the carotid artery in the neck. This flow then becomes noisy in the same way that a smoothly running river will become noisier at a set of a waterfall. If the inside of a blood vessel becomes irregular due to atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) or other injury to the arteries such as a dissection, the blood flow will become turbulent rather than smooth when squeezing through that irregularity.
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