I was hoping to read that it might also help people like myself who suffer from tinnitus. Sadly, no.
Still, if it can restore hearing to the deaf, this is a good thing.
Still, if it can restore hearing to the deaf, this is a good thing.
If tinnitus is a maladaptive neuroplasticity (your brain "needs" to hear something so if it can't because you're deaf at that frequency it'll invent things for you to hear instead) that makes sense to model as some stable limit cycle of a nonlinear system -- which is one of the leading hypotheses for tinnitus right now -- then it's not totally implausible that restoration of function would change your tinnitus percepts.
It's not clear that it'd help, but I'm pretty confident that if we can restore hair cell function, someone's going to try.
It's kind of remarkable the things work as well as they do given the difference between 0db where you can just hear and 110db or so where it breaks is a 300,000x or so difference in amplitude.
(diagram of movement to ion flow gizmo close up https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Schematic-Diagram-of-Ste... zoomed out a bit https://jcs.biologists.org/content/joces/126/8/1721/F1.large...)
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Strong temporary relief from tinnitus:
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 Fitness.org.
Tried this and it works well. Sometimes I get hours.
But, one strong jaw clench, and it comes back.
Note: by the time I finished writing this the ringing was back at "full" volume.
Most days i don't even notice it, until i notice the absence of it, which will promptly make it "return", or like now when i'm reading an article about it, and i'm very aware of it.
I then simply try to ignore it the best i can, and with a little practice you can "make it go away" to the point where you're not noticing it anymore. Don't ignore it by thinking of it, as this will surely make you aware of it. Ignore it by simply not thinking about it.
And as with all things you pick up on the internet, YMMV.
Unfortunately for me, they work better for "lower" frequencies. My tinnitus is around 10,000hz for which these "therapies" don't have as much impact.
Do you know of any existing self-treatment (e.g. an app that applies a notch filter on acting as a Spotify client) or do you happen to have any reference to more specific treatments that might be available on the market?
I believe this is the only research based treatment for tinnitus right now.
I also have it from too many raves. I can’t wear headphones anymore including AirPods.
Notch filters work some but healthy living has a big effect for me. Enough sleep, exercise, easy on intoxicants etc.
But just reading about and thinking about it is allowing me to hear something I normally tune out okay. It is sad what I’ve done to my hearing though. I wish there was a “cure.”
Sometimes when my tinnitus gets a bit worse I find I can hear it over the noise generator. Changing the pattern hides it again immediately for me.
So it's not a guaranteed fix, but I highly recommend talking to a TMJ specialist about your tinnitus and see if there is anything they can do. I think there also may be connections with blood pressure, vitamins/minerals, hydration, etc that could affect programmers sitting in chairs all day. Hope this helps, YMMV.
Sinus care, exercise, even losing weight all have positive effects on my perception of tinnitus. At its worse I could hear it over the sound of 2 stroke marine diesel engine (around 60dB ambient), its currently around 20dB.
I also have TMJ, I'll look into getting a specialist. Thanks for the tip!
I too had tinnitus for a long time and it all went away after chelation treatment against chronic mercury poisoning from amalgam fillings after being lucky that it was diagnosed (I had to actively search for a rare researcher/university clinic doctor specialist, nearly no chance with normal doctors). See my post history, I mention it a few times. I could write a few more pages about it all but in this format I'll leave it at that, people with the problem can decide for themselves if this is relevant for them. I was reluctant to post because I know a lot - most? - people don't take low-dose heavy metal poisonings seriously at all. I had people wanting to buy an espresso machine off of me despite me having revealed that I planned to scrap it because the water coming out of it had twice the official limit for lead in it (and the medical limit is zero so any lead would have been bad). Because "how bad can it be, such a tiny amount sure does not matter".
OP is from Scotland and I though it might be relevant because it seems they use that stuff according to this very recent document: https://www.gov.scot/publications/amalgam-dental-fillings-ac...
PS/EDIT:
By the way, my tinnitus went away within year one of chelation treatment. However, after almost a decade (of continued occasional chelation because it still helped) I had a lot of activity all of sudden for a few weeks around both ears. For the last decade I had shifting activity patterns in various areas, so that wasn't a surprise, I had expected something like that since that was a major impacted area. For weeks I could not listen to music and definitely not use a headset. Something was going on there and it wanted quiet.. Anyway, long story short - I can now hear much better than a decade ago! I first noticed because I've had the exact same MP3 player with the exact same songs for well over a decade, and the same in-ear headset for just as long. Suddenly I had to turn the (numerically adjusted) volume much farther down, into regions where previously I could not hear a thing apart from "music plays". Now I have to play everything on about 10-20% less volume than before, and it all happened exactly after those weeks of activity (where I even had to go to a doctor to get the ears cleaned, there was way more ear wax than usual during that time).
Chronic heavy metal toxicity is a subject rife with quackery and pseudoscience, especially when people start talking about chronic poisoning undetectable by conventional medicine. It's best to be careful whose story you believe. It's a hot button issue for me as a person "on the spectrum" because ill-informed parents subject their kids to Cutler protocol and other fringe chelation therapies under the belief that they're "curing" their kids of autism, and causing more health problems than they fix (chelators are themselves pretty toxic!)
Here are some resources about metal toxicity pseudoscience:
http://www.thinkingautismguide.com/2010/07/autism-and-biomed... (section "The Cutler Protocol")
https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Tests/uri...
Also, my jaw was in a bad state - a needle meant for mucosa injection went right deep in - in exactly all the places where I had had amalgam fillings. Nothing ever showed up in x-ray - which is normal, bone damage shows up in x-ray only when it's extreme (although a needle easily penetrating bone already is quite extreme). The doctor injected DMPS (chelator), the jaw healed.
Also, an double-size right-side thyroid with a nodule, stable for 2.5 decades, within half a year completely disappeared to the great amazement of my endocrinologist who had recommended surgery. There was lots of activity in the tissue around that area in my neck starting after I got chelation.
Warts on my feet, getting more and more numerous over the decades, completely gone.
Winter depression, psoriasis, colds (before diagnosis lasting the entire winter, getting longer and longer), eye issues, comprehension issues, digestion was bad and now is wonderful, - a long list of stuff JUST GONE NOW.
Look in a mirror for who is the quack, not to mention that with your accusation and remote diagnosis you are being quite an asshole.
The doctor I'm seeing is a researcher at a university clinic and always talks in "studies" and is very careful, never making any promises, always cautious with recommendations, preferring to do as little as possible. When I went there he said I must have something else, the levels of mercury found justify chelation treatment but are not high enough to explain all my problems. He never found anything else and improvement was far exceeding expectations. With chronic poisoning most of the stuff is hidden and comes out slowly, so yes, lab measurements usually cannot show it, I was "lucky" I had such highly elevated values. The doctor also makes no money - the university clinic charges a tiny bit (Germany, not US, it's next to nothing because there is nothing expensive, no medical imaging, just a few cheap lab tests, the chelators, DMPS and DMSA, some minor additions, are extra but inexpensive).
It depends, I have tinnitus and high-frequency hearing loss. It's not at the point where I need hearing aids, but anecdotally a friend of mine who got hearing aids reported that his tinnitus goes away when using them.