No Tinnitus Cure In Sight, But Plenty Of Therapies Make Ringing In The Ears Easier To Live With

Tinnitus–unnatural ringing, buzzing, hissing, humming and other unwanted sounds in your ear–can literally drive you crazy if you let it. Researchers have studied the phenomenon for years, and while there are range of theories about its causes, a good layman’s explanation is that when your hearing and auditory nerves suffer damage or degradation, the brain tries to make up for the lack of usual sounds by creating its own. Unfortunately there is no known conclusive cure. But as The Wall Street Journal recently reported, numerous therapies have been developed in recent years that can help you live with even a severe case of tinnitus.

My tinnitus crept up on me gradually, starting in my twenties, but when I suffered severe sudden hearing loss a few years ago, it came on like gangbusters. When I’m by myself in a quiet room, there’s a cacophony of noises in my head, including the weird phenomenon of phantom music. The good news is that when I’m wearing my hearing aids while I’m out and about interacting with people in the world, I barely notice my tinnitus. The real-world sounds seem to both mask the bothersome noises in my head and, just as important, distract my attention from them.

These two effects — masking and distraction — are the first steps in many of the most effective therapies. Tinnitus sound-masking devices simply create soothing music or white noise that blends with or overrides the tinnitus sounds. They can come in hearing-aid-like devices, ear-buds with hand-held units similar to MP3 players. They can also come in hearing aids themselves: Widex has incorporated its Zen sound-generating program into its flagship mind330 and mind220 series of hearing aids. The Zen program uses soothing music to fill in quiet periods and distract hearing-aid users from their tinnitus. Read more

Did Someone Say Those Noises In My Head Are Real? Or Am I Hearing Things Again?

A few weeks ago I posted an item about the noises I constantly hear in my head. These aren’t the usual hissing or ringing noises commonly associated with tinnitus. I’m talking about distinct sounds such as dump trucks and payloaders working at a hallucinatory construction site outside my window, a chain saw whining in the distance, several orchestral arrangements of “God Bless America” that played in my head without a break for two full days…. the list of real sounds heard distinctly goes on. Read more

The Noises That Inhabit My Head

Sometimes I still hear the insistent screeching, like an angry flock of birds or the screaming of the wind in a hurricane. It’s the same unearthly noise that millions of bat-like creatures made as they swarmed out of the open gates of hell in a horror movie I saw once. But now the noise only creeps in at the edges of my consciousness during quiet moments, like a barely remembered bad dream. It’s one of the many strange sounds in my head that have come and gone since the day I woke up with severe hearing loss several years ago. Read more