Electric shocks to the tongue can quiet chronic ringing ears
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
- Hearing loss and/or age
- Blood pressure
- TMJ (jaw/dental issues)
- Posture issues
There's a company in Ireland (Neuromod, I think) that has a product like this that seems to be able to work for some tinnitus sufferers, but not all - possibly owing to the differing types. FX322 is a hearing-loss drug that works via stem cells and has shown promising results in treating the hearing loss angle.
If yours is TMJ or blood pressure, though... you need an entirely different plan of attack.
Posting this comment mostly because I really get tired of reading threads where this isn't acknowledged; no one cure fits all. I've had it since I was a child and while habituation does factor in slightly, I think wider understanding of this all needs to be out there.
The only hint was a dip in a hearing chart, which wasn't big enough to be considered hearing loss or otherwise. This list alone is a better list of potential causes than those useless doctors.
Cut out wearing QC35s for a day or two and the ringing goes away at night.
Do noise-cancelling headphones from the likes of Bose et all "collapse" the sound waves via interference so that the sound waves that do reach my ear are physically lesser, or is it just merely masking noise with anti-noise, and so now I get twice the noise energy pumped into my ears even if I cannot actually hear it as much?
My guess would be not that the tinnitus gets worse from wearing noise canceling headphones, but that your ears adapt to the lower average sound levels, making them better at ‘detecting’ the tinnitus sound (the dynamic range of your ears adapts to average sound volume https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2774902/, but whether that affects the perceived volume of tinnitus isn’t clear to me)
As a child, I noticed a high-pitched sound during a particularly windy night in Wisconsin. Over the next few days it got louder and louder to the point it was quite frightening. Obviously, I had tinnitus, but unfortunately lacked the words to describe it to my parents (or they just wanted me to go to sleep haha).
Eventually I figured out that it was a cycle. The more I focused on the sound, the louder it got. As I worked to focus on on other things, it gradually subsided over a few days.
Now, as an adult, it is with me all the time. It gets much louder some days. This can be caused by a bad night of sleep. Or random things I can't figure out. Doctors have variously mentioned salt, tomatoes, trying antihistamines, etc.
But one thing I know makes it worse is noise - especially higher frequencies. As a result, I really dislike many of the newer (pre-covid) restaurants with the hard surfaces and tinny speakers playing harsh music all the time.
My kids got me iPod Pro's for Christmas and it has been wonderful. We went to NYC and by wearing them, I was able to enjoy loud restaurants, deal with the subway, etc.
I also notice that by wearing them for even a few hours, my tinnitus is often significantly improved. My theory is that it improved by decreasing the amount of stimulation.
For those who experienced the opposite, I wonder the quiet they experience allows them to hear the tinnitus clearly for the first time? Then they begin to focus on it which increases it's apparent volume as I did when I was young.
My understanding is that varies by person and "type" of tinnitus, but I know my tinnitus is often an inverse relationship with how quiet a room I am in (though it is a slow, dynamic adjustment) and sometimes a white noise generator is helpful to turn the tinnitus volume down a bit. Noise cancelling headphones can certainly create relatively "quiet rooms" that turn up the "tinnitus volume" for me (and part of why I generally prefer headphones without noise cancelling, personally).
Anyway, I just lowered the volume, that seemed to help quite a bit. I don't need the higher volume anyway now that the surrounding noises are cancelled.
Maybe some almost inaudible frequency spectra, and in a lesser degree also audible frequencies, sometimes aren't phase-matched by the injected anti-sound, so that their peaks add up, creating an unnatural loud sound, which for some reason isn't perceived as harmful.
These short out-of-sync peaks could be causing the tinnitus?
I got myself Airpods Pro last autumn and used the transparent mode. After a few weeks my tinnitus had become way worse. After 3-4 months it had died down a bit (but not to what it used to be before the pods.)
I then used them again for a couple of days. And it became even worse. Haven't used them for 6 months and unfortunately it is still as bad.
I don't dare using them or my Bose headphones anymore. Your comment is the first I've seen relating noise cancelling with tinnitus.
Have you attempted noise cancelling mode?
Have you attempted turning off the noise control altogether?
Maybe it's an issue with lack of "natural" sound causing you to turn up the volume more, or something like that?
They definitely cancel noise by 'anti-noise'.
Now my tinnitus is so bad that it drives me nuts to use ear plugs, I need a constant wall of noise around me.
How on earth do they know if guinea pigs have tinnitus and if this method shut it off in them?
> we developed a guinea pig model of tinnitus induced by noise exposure ...
> choosing a stimulus interval known to induce long-term depression (LTD). Twenty minutes per day of LTD-inducing bimodal (but not unimodal) stimulation reduced physiological and behavioral evidence of tinnitus in the guinea pigs
https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/10/422/eaal3175
I'm not anti-science and I understand the need for animal testing to reduce risks to humans but this raises serious ethical concerns where no such risk to humans exists.
Are they saying this stimulation that apparently cures tinnitus also causes depression?
What concerns? We already test on animals merely for cosmetics...
Maybe there is some risk of this tinnitus treatment causing harm (could be something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome), and animal testing would avoid that. But it's not necessary to inflict extra suffering to show that. Maybe they had to show the combination of the treatment with tinnitus doesn't cause harm but I doubt that.
There's also an argument where a disease is rare and inflicting animals with it to allows for efficacy testing, but tinnitus isn't rare, plenty of human volunteers are available. (I mean, half the people in this thread have already "volunteered" to perform testing of possible treatments on themselves, myself included).
Lastly as others have pointed out there are many causes of tinnitus. The researchers only inflicted one kind of it (I'd assume it's the same kind that everyone hears after hearing loud noises, since these guinea pigs were presumably otherwise healthy), it's possible this treatment only works on that kind and is a waste of time for everyone else.
I think the idea was "unless is needed to avoid harm" in general, not "unless is needed to avoid harm caused by people using a non-essential product".
E.g. curing cancer is OK, making BS products like cosmetics safer is pushing it as a justification (since those could just, like, not be made in the first place).
What is the purpose of inflicting tinnitus on animals?
BP now hovers around 100 / 60, resting heart rate in the 70's, and I rarely experience tinnitus any more.
My tinnitus is still absolutely horrible, almost always there in some fashion, strong nearly every night, and drives me to near-insanity half a dozen times a month.
Just for another perspective.
I don’t think this treatment would help me. My understanding is there are little hairs that pick up sound waves, and excessive noise can destroy those, and you don’t get them back. The brain fills in with the ringing noise. But I don’t see how the stimulation would reset that process.
Ear protection is of course a requirement when playing a drum kit, which is very loud. But when playing viola?
What I've noticed is that the level at which I perceive it is completely linked with my anxiety level. I always ear it but when I'm tired or anxious, it's loud while when I'm really relaxed, it can become very faint.
Unfortunately, I must be a pretty anxious person as it's loud most of the time.
I’ve tried lots and lots of different diets (in the balance-of-foods type) over the years though and nothing really helped or harmed the tinnitus in any noticeable way.
It shouldn't be bothering you at all at this point if you've had it that long.
If you want to keep on suffering, go ahead, or you can learn to live with it.
I got to warn you, stopping sugar consumption cold turkey is not easy and not nice. That stuff is like (what I imagine) crack. First two weeks were awful.
Just for another data point, when I moved to the US I did not like the taste of processed sugars in a lot of the standard supermarket food here and found it pretty trivial to give it up.
Like the amplifiers are turned up to max at some frequencies, and the neural net maybe even adds an interpolated perception.
If that theory has anything to it, it makes sense that it might be possible to train your brain to reduce the effect.
That's not just "accepting", but it might be difficult to perceive a difference if "accepting" results in "not noticing as much", and "not noticing as much" is indistinguishable from "turning down my brain's perception gain for these signals".
Here's what it's like.
Imagine someone is standing right behind you with a little whiteboard and scratches the chalk on it. It makes this high pitched sound you cringe at, right?.
Someone is doing that slowly, and the chalk is tiny, so the sound is not super loud, and can be covered by music, people talking etc.
But that person keeps scratching all the time. A little bit. Every second of every minute, of every quiet moment at home, in the mountains, in your electric supposedly-quiet car, of your every mindfulness meditation practice. For years.
So can you "tune out"? Maybe if you dull your senses and have laser focused attention for most of the day. But it keeps coming back. And again, and again. It can be confusing, annoying, funny, or just be there. Your reactions vary, as you learn to adjust to it (if you try to).
But "tune out" suggests once it's done, it's gone.
This is never gone, it's the opposite of gone - it's there even if I stop breathing!
(1) Actual nature of the sound varies between people.
Same way I stop noticing sometimes that someone is trying to talk to me, or that I have a deadline that's drifting past, or that I haven't eaten or moved from my chair all day.
The sound doesn't go away, but I stop noticing.
I'll start noticing again if I'm trying to listen to something quiet, and realise the tinnitus is louder and slightly masking what I'm trying to hear.
Or any time I pay attention to what I can hear in the background.
I don't tend to notice the tinnitus if music is playing, or I'm talking with someone.
I agree with you that it's never gone. Though I've noticed the volume varies a lot. From quiet like the background sounds from outside where I live on a quiet day, or even quieter than the sound of breathing and my heart beating, to as loud as someone talking to me. The tones vary too. Fortunately they are usually higher frequency than what I'm listening too which reduces masking.
I've had tinnitus since I was a child, so I doubt it's due to age-related hearing loss. I don't know a cause, but back then I noticed it was louder when I was ill and stuck in bed, and actually I found it comforting then, like it sounded like my body processing as it should.
However, I count myself massively lucky that it did slowly resolve over about 5 years, to the point where I’d now consider it nearly gone.
I know it’s easy to lose hope, and get really frustrated by it, but I hope you have good days coming to you. Good luck.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6950042/
You can send me that $50k now
The antioxidant group received one multivitamin-multimineral tablet once a day with their meal and one tablet of alpha-lipoic acid twice a day on an empty stomachok, here is a version of it:
> 1) Place the palms of your hands over your ears so your fingers wrap around the back of your head.
> 2) Set your middle fingers on the top of your neck right at the base of your skull.
> 3) Put your index fingers on top of your middle fingers and apply pressure.
> 4) Now snap them on the back of your head over and over like you’re drumming.
> 5) Repeat it about 50 times.
> Ideally, when you pull your hands away, you won’t hear any ringing, hissing, or buzzing anymore.
https://lifehacker.com/this-weird-trick-might-give-you-brief...
Either way, I'm seriously bummed out. It had gotten so much better. Hopefully it gets better again.
Normally it's just a slight ringing that i hardly notice if there is other stuff going on, but when i get stressed, or slouch in my office chair, it can gain volume in the evening.
I've learned to "ignore" mine. As i'm typing this i'm very aware of it because i'm "focusing on it", but when i'm doing work, watching tv, or even walking the dog i don't notice it. I find it to be the most annoying when i'm trying to listen to quiet tv, or trying to fall asleep.
What i normally do is try to focus on some other background noise. Rain falling on a window, my wife or dog breathing. This usually makes it "go away" for long enough that i'm not annoyed by it anymore.
Fun fact, ANC headphones will make mine disappear which makes absolutely no sense as the noise is non audible, so there's no noise for the headphones to cancel, and yet it goes away, or at least becomes inaudible.
[1] https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/neuromodulationTonesGenera...
There is some research that playing sounds "near" the frequency of your tinnitus stimulates the ear system and helps reduce the tinnitus.
That app produces pulsating sounds around your tinnitus frequencies.
It's the only thing that had helped mine.
Tinnitus is a mental process, but you can't work with it using thought or direct attention. It requires shifting lower more subtle processes. It's a form of meditation
I also found out that tinnitus gets worse if I'm listening to it, and almost disappears when I quit giving a fuck about it. Also, if you have one, and you are subject to nervousness do not try that fingers-on-the-nape trick. It will disappear and then may return back two-three times worse for some time. Strangely, I have severe one, but don't care much.
Also, it intesifies in threads like this one, probably because I'm actively thinking about it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6950042/
I started taking lots of antioxidants to improve immune function in an attempt to improve my chances with COVID and my tinnitus improved a lot!
The antioxidant group received one multivitamin-multimineral tablet once a day with their meal and one tablet of alpha-lipoic acid [300 mg a-lipoic acid per tablet] twice a day on an empty stomachI've had sinus problems since childhood. Some exposure to loud music. An upper back spine injury that affects my neck and chest muscles. With this I sometimes had tinnitus, usually worse in the evenings or after spending many hours in front of a screen.
Then I got knocked on the head twice, the second time left a small dent in my nose, and it damaged the right side of my jaw. After this the tinnitus became more permanent.
Almost worse than the tinnitus is that my ears are always popping, as in many times per day. Just sitting at my desk I'll get the same sensation you get on descent when scuba diving, and I have to pinch my nose and blow on it to equalize. Any else have this symptom?
Anyhow, I have a "popping" noise when I tilt my head back and forth. I simply learned to live with it. After the last sickness, I also developed a "clogged" feeling in my left ear, with my ear doctor telling me that "everything looks fine."
I also learned to live with this.
If they can give sight to the blind, balance to the unbalanced, and 3D navigation sense to Navy SEALS divers... then imagine what a low-cost tongue electrode peripheral could provide for gaming, sports, and other daily applications.
Imagine a AR/VR headset wit a wire to your mouth that allowed you to sense infrared/UV spectrum without hindering your vision. Or spatial radar sensing when you are driving your car or flying a drone. Or any number of inputs in a game. Maybe providing an extra sense of balance could even help espace the VR nausea problem.
The applications of this simple low-cost tech are astounding, and helping with tinnitus is icing on the cake.
Who is willing to build this? A 16x16 electrode grid peripheral for phones, computers, VR?
[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/can-you-see-with-your-...
0. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It used to really bug me. It's going full tilt this morning, the loudest it gets, and doesn't bother me at all.
I have constant tinnitus, ever since I was a child. I grew up thinking everyone heard that high pitched buzzing.
A recent hearing check showed I have better than average hearing for my age. I have TMJ disorder, but I didn't (I don't think) as a child.
I currently subscribe to the theory that mine may be caused by like, a blood vessel by chance too close to the eardrum or whatever, and that there is nothing I can do about it.
Regardless, the possible causes seem to span a wide range of things totally unrelated so everyone who didn't get it from exposure to loud sounds is on a highly personal journey.
I mean some of the reasoning in the article is so hand-wavy. Like, saying that stimulating the tongue stimulates the brain. No shit, stimulating any nerve stimulates the part of the brain that feels touch in that nerve. I don’t buy it.
Anyway, I'm luckily one of the people who's able to sort of tune the tinnitus out.
I pretty much forget I have it until I see an article about it...
"And they saw an average drop of about 14 points on a tinnitus severity score of one to 100, the researchers report today in Science Translational Medicine"
Sidebar: Having done this as a kid, I ended up being able to taste polarity. Hold one wire with finger, taste other and the polarity affects the "taste" sensation.
And I realize I don't really have words to describe what it is like.