Tinnitus and Living With It
Doctors who commit crimes.

This week I attended a meeting of the Los Angeles Tinnitus Association led by a wonderful lady, Nellie Negro. I was appalled by the number of tinnitus patients who “cried” that they had seen the specialist and been told that nothing can be done for it; just that the patient should learn to live with it.

This is criminal in my estimation. I can see the frustration and indeed suffering that these patients have at being made to feel that they are less than whole, that the doctor has little concern for what the patient feels. Besides, the information is plain wrong.

Certain cases of tinnitus are treatable – fluid in the inner ear, hypertension, certain drug toxicity, etc. Usually the specialist is able to diagnose and treat those.

But for those patients who don’t have these treatable conditions, there are a number of therapies that work; steps patients can do for relief of tinnitus.

Some patients do well with just playing music to “distract” from the tinnitus.

Reduce the stress component that makes tinnitus worse. There are dozens of approaches here – distraction, relaxation, etc. The best one, needless to say, is in my book, Stressed? Anxiety? Your Cure is in the Mirror. Okay, so I’m not modest.
Cover For Stressed- Anxiety- Your Cure is in the Mirror_COVER-1
Other therapies are Cognitive Therapy. Here the therapist helps the patient understand their symptoms and how to reprogram that understanding. When young police officers develop tinnitus from gun fire, they are assured that “everyone gets it, is part of the job,” so they don’t have stress about it and do learn to ignore it.

Just a simple thing like sleep hygiene to help sleep can be the difference in being plagued by lowered quality of life vs having minimal disturbance from the tinnitus sound. I have my tinnitus patients go to sleep with the Shopping Channel!

We know that tinnitus can be inhibited. It is like shining a light in your eye and you can’t see for a while, or when you first go into the sunlight. Similarly some tinnitus patients can have residual inhibition when sound similar to their tinnitus sound is listened to. This is one of the principles of the sound device, Dynamic Tinnitus Mitigation, developed by Audio Bionics in Pasadena, California..

There are dozens of studies, including mine, that report that biofeedback, where you lower the electrical output of your tight muscles, benefits tinnitus. That is the basis of using a mirror to see your muscles relax. When you reduce stress, and the stress chemicals, the tinnitus symptoms are significantly reduced.

The idea of this article is not to present Tinnitus therapy, but to tell persons with tinnitus that there are many avenues of therapies that can relieve their symptoms. True, doctors don’t have a pill that will completely make the tinnitus go away. But neither do they have one for Hypertension or Diabetes. Still, millions have good productive lives with these diagnoses. You can too, with tinnitus.

Just today there was a report from England of a father who attended a rock concert, developed tinnitus and then killed himself. This might not have happened if his doctor had given him the remedies we speak of here.

Ignore the recommendation to “just live with it.” Look into stress reduction, physical exercise, music distraction, the Dynameic Tinnitus Mitigation, guided visualization or the many procedures that tinnitus patients have used to reduce or eliminate their symptoms.