Tinnitus Treatment

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Tinnitus Treatment – Introduction

The tinnitus treatment recommended by your physician will depend on the underlying cause of your tinnitus. That is to say that there are several health issues that, if present, can cause tinnitus. Unfortunately, on many occasions — in as much as 43% of cases — the definitive cause cannot be identified. However, where the root cause can be identified, then the appropriate treatment program can commence…

Let’s take impacted earwax as an example: A build-up of earwax can cause tinnitus, so, by removing the ear wax, the tinnitus can be eliminated. However, you have to make sure that the ear wax is removed professionally, because if you try it yourself, you can actually cause the wax to be impacted even more. Or, worse still, you can cause actual physical damage which may not be repairable.

Another example of an underlying cause is middle or inner ear infection. Your physician will usually prescribe antibiotics to cure the infection which should then lead to a cessation of the tinnitus.

So, where the root cause can be diagnosed and is treatable, the tinnitus treatment regimen would be to cure the underlying health problem leading to the elimination of the tinnitus.

But, as I stated earlier, there are several underlying health issues that can cause tinnitus. In no particular order, they are things such as; head or neck trauma, stress and anxiety, meniere’s disease, age-related hearing loss, noise-damaged hearing, eustachian tube blockage, otosclerosis, hypertension, anemia, atherosclerosis, sinus problems, ear infections, ear wax, etc.

You can see straightaway that there are certain health issues that could be permanent — e.g. noise-damaged hearing and age-related hearing loss — and therefore actually ‘curing’ tinnitus would be highly unlikely. However, in cases such as these, the tinnitus treatment would be special therapy to help you manage the symptoms more effectively, so that they impact your day-to-day life much less.

Tinnitus Treatment – Mainstream Options

The following is not a full list, but typical of these tinnitus treatment options are:-

Hearing Aids and / or Tinnitus Maskers

A tinnitus sufferer will usually hear the sounds more when the ambient external sound is lower. For example, as they lie in bed quietly at night, they will hear their sounds rather loudly. On the other hand, if they are walking up a busy street with lots of people and traffic, then they will hear their tinnitus sounds much less, because the extraneous noise is helping to cancel out their internal noises.

Hearing aids can amplify external sound so that the tinnitus sounds appear less. These are especially useful for folks with poor hearing and in external environments. Then there are tinnitus maskers that actually produce their own noise (e.g. white noise) in order to try to balance out the internal and external sounds. These are especially effective in quite environments where there is no appreciable external sound, for example, in the bedroom, reading room, etc.

Tinnitus Retraining Therapy (TRT)

This is a technique carried out by trained therapists and counsellors. It combines two therapies in one concerted effort to help you cope better with your tinnitus on a daily basis. It uses both sound therapy and counselling to help you remove the negative associations you have with your tinnitus.

It is based on the principal that your brain responds to the sounds of tinnitus in certain ways. And if you can ‘retrain’ your brain to react in a different way, then you can reduce the negative associations and reduce the perception of the sounds, so that they are no more of a problem than, for instance, the buzz of your refridgerator.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)

This is a combined therapy designed to help you change how you think (the cognitive bit) and what you do (the behavioural bit) as a result of that thought process. The sessions can be done one-on-one or in groups. However, today there are computer programs available so that you can go through the therapy at home.

Instead of looking backwards at potential causes of your current problem, CBT focusses on the hear and now. It attempts to change the way you think and what you do as a result, and in this way to improve your state of mind. It is especially effective in tinnitus cases where there is anxiety or depression, where it can help to turn negative emotions into positive ones.

Counselling

This is a so-called ‘talking therapy’ wherein the counsellor helps the tinnitus sufferer to understand more about their condition, along with possible solutions for their particular case. Through a greater understanding of their condition, and by receiving constant reassurance from their counsellor, the sufferer can discover ways to help cope more effectively and so reduce the effects of their tinnitus.

Support Groups

Support groups can be a very useful place to help get over the feeling of helplessness and of being alone with your problem. Just the very fact that there are others just like yourself with this problem helps to give you some strength to move forward. And by sharing one another’s experiences you can perhaps discover ways of thinking about and managing your condition that otherwise you may have missed out on.

Contact your public library or even your physician perhaps, to get details on groups near you. Alternatively, you can do a search on the Internet for your locality.

Surgery

This would only be embarked upon where there is a clear structural reason for the tinnitus that, if it were repaired, would either cure the tinnitus, or, give a better improvement than any other treatment option. Surgery is usually a last resort.

Medications

I have already talked at the beginning about antibiotics for infection-induced tinnitus. However there are some other drug-based medications that may be used to address some of the issues that can help to trigger tinnitus or make the symptoms seem worse…

For example, depression, anxiety, and stress are often associated with tinnitus, so physicians sometimes prescribe antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs, to address these in the hope that the symptoms may reduce. Other medications are antihistamines which can be used to treat allergies, and, anticonvulsant and cardiovascular drugs.

The thing to remember is that, so far, there isn’t a clinically proven drug to cure tinnitus, which is one of the reasons why more and more sufferers are turning to natural tinnitus treatment…

Tinnitus Treatment – Natural Approach

Natural tinnitus treatment is finding favour because it not only addresses the symptoms but also the underlying issues. And natural treatment does this without the negative side effects of drugs.

For example, if you have high blood pressure there are natural ways of reducing that. If you are anemic, there are natural remedies for that too. Stress and anxiety can be reduced without drugs.

And many of the other underlying causes of tinnitus can also be addressed using the same natural approaches such as, herbal, homeopathy, dietary supplements, dietary changes, lifestyle adjustments, self-help, and so on.

Unfortunately, as I stated in the introduction, in many cases the underlying cause cannot be identified. So this is where a more broad-based approach can prove much more effective…

By addressing, not just the physical, but also the emotional and social aspects — i.e. a whole-body, holistic approach to treatment — more and more sufferers around the world are finding great success in eliminating their tinnitus.

One of the most popular, if not the most popular, holistic system for curing tinnitus is the Tinnitus Miracle system, which is available as a direct download. If you’re interested, you can find out more by clicking here.

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