Tinnitus Forum - Mytinnitus

Hi Peter,

Welcome to the forum.

First of all, although there can be a myriad of reasons that alone or in combination can trigger the tinnitus, I would doubt that it is what you suspect, namely having closed your ears to protect them from noise.

Secondly, it is very much a myth that tinnitus is due to a damage of the inner ear. According to more recent insights, tinnitus is primarily a nervous problem. Your nervous system (as far as your hearing is concerned) has simply been thrown out of balance somewhat for some reason, and your brain is producing this tinnitus sound now as a kind of compensation. So what one has to aim for now is trying to slowly get this back into the old balance again. Trying to calm your nerves down as far as possible should obviously be the best recipe for an improvement, while on the other hand you should avoid any further unnecessary stimulation of your nervous system like through caffeine, alcohol, stress etc. You might also want to try if, like for me, the occasional intake of a simple painkiller (paracetamol or aspirin) can calm things down here. I have also made good experience with alcohol free beer in this respect.

Thomas

Peter,

I have no medical background as such either, but I am a scientist (physicist), so I think I can allow myself to come to my own conclusions here, especially as the modern medical interpretation seems to go along similar lines regarding the interpretation of the tinnitus as a nervous feedback phenomenon. I am not able to discuss this on a medical basis (and I am not aware that anybody else could deliver more than speculations here either), but if you think of the common phenomenon of an acoustic/electrical feedback, then this pretty much demonstrates the effect: if a microphone is too sensitive or too close to the loudspeaker it is connected to, then you get a loud feedback noise due to the amplification of the internal noise of the system. I imagine that a similar thing happens if your hearing system becomes unbalanced for some reason (after all, it is also an electro-acoustic system). Unfortunately, the problem is not as easily solved as for the microphone/loudspeaker system (simply because you can not physically change a lot with your hearing system), but it should be obvious that toning down the activity of your nervous system should lessen the problem.

It is true that anxiety plays a big role in maintaining the tinnitus, if not in producing it (after all, it very much stresses the nervous system, and thus further fuels the feedback process). It is said that many tinnitus sufferers are ambitious and self-critical people, who often 'listen into themselves' , and this makes it all too easy for the tinnitus to gain a foothold. This is probably also the reason why older people may be more prone to this; younger people are usually more extroverted and just do not care so much about things. Having said this, I can say that I have been getting emails from teenagers up to people in their eighties over the years, with the majority probably between 30 and 50 (altough I don't know how much this is biased by the internet use). But it is certainly by no means so that this affects only the elderly. In the last decades, the average age has gone down very much here (I remember having read a study regarding the age distribution a few years ago, but I can't find it anymore at the moment).

Thomas

peter wrote:

PS And lastly, your written (and no doubt spoken) English is extraordinary--to say better than about half my fellow Americans! My daughter spent some time in Berlin and came back quite impressed on the same score. Excellent!

Thanks for the compliment, but I have actually been living for many years in the UK now, which also explains why I made a bilingual website in the first place. I got the German website address only because I could get a better webhosting deal with this at the time. Since the beginning of this year, the site content is actually hosted on a server in the US (again because I could get a better deal there), so there is even an American element in it at the moment (although normally you won't notice it obviously).
Thomas

has anyone else noticed that it always seems to be the left ear?