Tinnitus Relief

[Duck]

Sometimes I will notice that the heartbeat in my ear moves the fabric of my pillow enough to make a rustling sound. A curiosity when I wake up, but occasionally a distraction when trying to get to sleep.

Yep! I used to hear my pulse as a child with my ear on the pillow, only occasionally as an adult. For a while I got a humming sound like electricity, but I can't say that tinnitus rings any bells for me.

 

[charf]

I have it in both ears from 30 years of working in noisy engineering shops and shooting. Just a constant high pitched noise in both ears. Doesn’t bother me too much. Is worse at some times than others. I always try encourage younger guys to protect their hearing.

 

[hoosierpipeguy]

It's important not to give anyone false hope, either. There is no cure (that I know of) for the physical damage.

The psychological aspect is what we have some control over. When you fixate on the noise, your mind makes it worse and anxiety/depression often follow. Noticeable hearing loss would make tinnitus more apparent since you're working extra hard to hear what's going on around you. I suspect that in your case, once the hearing aid allowed you to hear better, you were able to relax and start tuning out the tinnitus.

In my case, my hearing is still pretty good. I can hear up to about 14kHz with no gaps (par for a 43-year-old, and hearing aids never came up as a topic during recent hearing tests), and I've worked hard to protect it along the way, which is why the tinnitus seems unfair. Once I was able to move through the stages of grief, I could start to relax again. There are a lot of people on r/tinnitus who are in purgatory because they think a miracle cure is right around the corner. I had to unsubscribe in a hurry because it was so depressing. Habituation is the way, IME.

I didn't intend to imply I had received a cure. I don't think relaxing had/has anything to do with it. I believe the hearing aids provide a more consistent or constant sound stimulation that relieves the tinnitus. If I focus, I can still hear a very faint ringing. However, it is so faint it isn't normally noticeable.

I believe I have 10 to 20% hearing loss in both ears. I didn't google the data but I would be well less than 1/2 the people who technically would benefit from hearing aids actually have them. That seems like a shame to me. My message was primarily intended to encourage people with hearing problems and tinnitus to at least be evaluated by a professional and explore that avenue for improved hearing and possibly relief from tinnitus. I cannot guarantee either will be a fit for any individual, I can attest to how hearing aids have helped me.

 

[Sobrbiker]

Thankfully mine doesn’t drive me nuts (pretty severe, bilateral, continual) like I’ve seen it do some. Mine’s just bout the only reliable constant in life, so there’s that
Concerts in the eighties, years of thousands of rounds of centerfire rifle per year with just foamies, open cab heavy equipment (search YouTube for “two stroke Detroit Terex” to hear what my apprenticeship was like), decades of open pipe Harleys with no helmet, etc…

Acceptance is the only treatment I know of. I thank god that I can appreciate the peace of still hunting deer in the high desert, of the breeze in the night, or just the sound of nothing at all.
It could always be worse.

 

[PaulRVA]

Thankfully mine doesn’t drive me nuts (pretty severe, bilateral, continual) like I’ve seen it do some. Mine’s just bout the only reliable constant in life, so there’s that
Concerts in the eighties, years of thousands of rounds of centerfire rifle per year with just foamies, open cab heavy equipment (search YouTube for “two stroke Detroit Terex” to hear what my apprenticeship was like), decades of open pipe Harleys with no helmet, etc…

Acceptance is the only treatment I know of. I thank god that I can appreciate the peace of still hunting deer in the high desert, of the breeze in the night, or just the sound of nothing at all.
It could always be worse.

I didn’t consider the drag pipes.
I had a FLH and a 50 Pan with them
myself. Couldn’t have helped any.
I rode that Pan from out your way
From Jerome AZ all the way to Virginia.

 

[cosmicfolklore]

Damn, someone brought this thread back up in the list, and my ears are fucking ringing again. Stop this!!!

 

[sardonicus87]

I've had ENT problems basically since birth. As an infant, I had tubes in my ears and had my adenoids removed. As a pre-teen, I had ear infections again that we couldn't afford to treat, so my ear drums ended up bursting and the infection drained, but I've had tinnitus ever since then.

Anyway, when I was 14 or so, I got "walking pneumonia". I ended up getting pneumonia 4 times in 2 years, so my GP sent me to an ENT specialist, they did a cat scan and had a staph infection with polyps in my left maxillary sinus. So at 16, went in for endoscopic nasal surgery where they took my tonsils (which were always oversized, but would swell up when sick to the point it was hard to swallow), lasered open my nasal passages, and cleaned out the infection.

Today, I have problems and have to go in about once a year to have impacted wax removed. I don't put anything in my ears, but my ears already produce a lot of wax and it's also very sticky wax. Compound that with the fact that I also have eczema and the result is wax that doesn't fall out like it's supposed to. I've recently gotten an endoscopic ear wax tool with a spoon that has various tips because insurance never pays for my ear cleaning ($150).

Anyway, I've had mild tinnitus all my life and just live with it. Occasionally, maybe 1-2 times a year, it'll spike to the point of being painful. There's no treatment for tinnitus. Some things can make it worse for some people, like caffeine and nicotine. Neither seems to affect mine.

I don't really find it hard to live with and my hearing is still decent. I got way more and way worse problems than tinnitus, like the schizophrenia with severe negative symptoms (and of course, still no treatments exist for the negative symptoms), permanent [mild] pseudoparkinsonism from prior treatment of the aforementioned schizophrenia that I also can't treat because the medications to treat it could make the schizophrenia worse, severe delayed sleep phase disorder, and a plethora of other annoyances (seborrheic dermatitis, mild dyshidrotic hand eczema, mild hyperhidrosis of hands and feet, poultry meat intolerance, chronic gingivitis, and probably 10 other things I'm forgetting)... so yeah, untreatable tinnitus is not only par for the course for my life, but relatively nothing in the grand scheme of things.