Tinnitus Therapy by Murray Grossan M.D.

In my book, Stressed? Anxiety? Your Cure is in the Mirror there is a section for tinnitus therapy that has helped my patients.

No matter what the condition- a cut finger, an allergy, a sore throat, or tinnitus, stress chemicals can make it worse, so reducing stress is important for you to help you feel well.

STRESS and PAIN: In other words, a cut finger hurts, no question about that. But if you add stress and anxiety then the pain increases. Remember when the finger felt better after mom kissed it?

CHANGE THE CHEMISTRY: As part of the book, we also do a visualization of going back in time before the current problem. The idea is that if we can reproduce the chemistry of your body before the current finger pain, that should make things better. Great actors do this, by the way, when they play sad or happy roles.

TIME TRAVEL: One of the interesting things about tinnitus is that some persons have “time traveled” to before they had the tinnitus and felt that it went away. This is not unexpected, since masking and music also may work for some tinnitus patients.

For most patients we ask them to play music that “masks” or displaces the tinnitus sound. What gives us “two for the price of one” benefit, is to visualize before the tinnitus using music that was popular, for example at age 18, and the tinnitus started at age 45.

In tinnitus there is a chemical component. The idea is that by utilizing all five senses in visualization, maybe we can create the good chemistry before the tinnitus began. This does take practice and in the stress book there are exercises that show you how it is done.

There are no side effects to visualization, so I do recommend it for anyone who is bothered by tinnitus.

Time travel also works for other conditions. One of my patients had all kinds of stress problems and was having difficulty “relaxing.” I asked him to have music in the background as much as possible. He had a long commute and played music from his childhood back in his native country. This flooded him with happy memories of his youth and was instrumental in reducing his overall stress.

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