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Comment by Flands | Hacker News Reader

Place the palms of your hands over your ears with fingers resting gently on the back of your head. Your middle fingers should point toward one another just above the base of your skull. Place your index fingers on top of you middle fingers and snap them (the index fingers) onto the skull making a loud, drumming noise. Repeat 40-50 times. Some people experience immediate relief with this method. Repeat several times a day for as long as necessary to reduce tinnitus.Dr. Jan Strydom, of A2Z of Health, Beauty and Fintess.org.

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Do you know why this works? Because it jostles the sternocleidomastoid muscle which connects to the base of your skull behind your ears.

If this technique cures/helps your tinnitus its because you probably sit/stand with bad posture. You can attain more lasting results by regularly stretching that muscle (massage/pull on it). This will not cure hearing-loss related tinnitus.

Personal experience: this not only cured my tinnitus, but also cured a pattern of headaches I was experiencing as well as pain from my eyes that I thought was due to eye strain (from being latched onto a computer screen).

Do you have a source for this? It seems dubious that tapping a muscle 50 times would be an effective treatment for muscle strain.

...isn't that sort of what a massage is?

Ah, that's interesting. In the past I've had mild tinnitus only in my right ear, and I've had a sensitive sternocleidomastoid, but only the right one!

I use to suffer from bad head aches, pain from my eyes as well as a throbbing pain. Though it was just from withdrawal from having too much caffeine/sugar and then going cold turkey on them which I was doing in cycles.

Is there a good illustration of this method? I have tried to interpret it several times over the years and never experienced any benefit.

https://lifehacker.com/this-weird-trick-might-give-you-brief...

For me it only works partially and only for a brief time.

Same here - 10 seconds of relief at most. Very welcome, certainly but so short :(.

I don't know if I did it right, but it changed the tone in my right ear.

Make sure it thumps on the back of the tendons attached to the skull. If it works, the silence is as much of a relevation as a deaf person hearing. Ok. Perhaps not,but having known no different for 25yrs, the silence was pretty epic.

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