Tinnitus: What are the treatment options?

What Kind of Tinnitus Plan Can Help?

Based on your hearing test results and your answers to the tinnitus questionnaires, a treatment plan will be developed. Answering the questions honestly and judiciously is your best chance for a good outcome.

Treatment Plans to Reduce Tinnitus Annoyance

Unfortunately, there are no quick fixes for tinnitus reduction. However, education and knowing where you can “get away” from annoying tinnitus is helpful for a large percentage of people with mild to moderately-severe tinnitus.

Reduce Caffeine Consumption

Tinnitus from caffeine. Simply reducing caffeine consumption may eliminate tinnitus.

Change your Medication

Tinnitus as a side effect of medicine. If you are on medicines that you need to be healthy, those will not be taken away. Sometimes your physician can recommend a different medicine and tinnitus may be reduced.

Stress Management

Tinnitus due to stress. Stress can make tinnitus worse or even flare-up. Knowing this may make tinnitus more tolerable if you know that stress is a cause. Yoga or stress management may be helpful.

Add Soft Room Noise

Tinnitus in quiet. People who are annoyed severely from tinnitus in quiet may need to add soft room noise that is pleasing to them in order to help reduce tinnitus annoyance.

Wearing Hearing Aids

Tinnitus as a result of hearing loss. In many cases, wearing hearing aids for 6-8 hours a day may reduce tinnitus after a period of several months.

Hearing aids help reduce tinnitus annoyance by bringing outside or ambient noise. Increased ambient noise can help the brain focus on other noises rather than your tinnitus. Soft gain characteristics from the outer hair cells in the cochlea do not work properly when hearing loss is involved; using hearing aids helps stimulate auditory areas that do not receive this information on a regular basis. Individuals suffering from tinnitus without hearing loss may be fit with wearable noise/sound generators to help reduce tinnitus annoyance as well.

Tinnitus Therapy

Tinnitus habituation therapy. If you have been tested audiologically and hearing loss and medical issues have been eliminated as possible cause for tinnitus, you may be a candidate for tinnitus habituation therapy. The idea is to fit you with sound generators and have you listen to very low level sounds throughout the day. Using a sound generator will not affect communication in any way. By wearing this device you can train the brain to ignore the tinnitus. For many individuals, this training is helpful in reducing tinnitus annoyance throughout the day. Over time your brain may forget about the tinnitus.

For more information or to schedule an appointment with an audiologist please call (531) 355–6338.

• Transcript

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  Tinnitus

  Tinnitus is a condition that people actually complain about or notice. It’s a word meaning ringing and ringing for most people could be either a buzz in the ear, cricket sounds, and whooshing sounds.

  Most people generally think that tinnitus happens with people that have some type of hearing loss or hearing disorder of some sort, though not always. We do see some people in here with normal hearing that have tinnitus issues, but it is more common among older individuals and it does seem to increase with age, particularly after age 65.

  For some people they can have pervasive tinnitus and you know, very minimal hearing loss but they are so focused on the tinnitus that it does affect their mood, anxiety, concentration, and ability to sleep.

  There is a strong correlation between tinnitus and sleep and tinnitus and stress. There are also many medications that the side effect is tinnitus.

  There are certain things that make tinnitus worse, something as common as middle ear pressure or fullness that can you know, some people that can be a trigger for tinnitus. Ear wax can cause tinnitus in some folks.

  The ENT will probably ask enough questions to figure out or the nurse will figure out what things they are doing that are causing the tinnitus or things they can stop doing to alleviate the tinnitus.

  There isn’t a cure, pill wise, and the best recommendation is counseling, hearing aids, amplification is recommended for people that have tinnitus​ and hearing loss and some type of noise therapy.

  There is a lot of apps you can have people download now that they can use, environmental noises, rain, water noises, to kind of help them listen to something else and forget about the tinnitus.

  Everybody is different so there is not just one thing you can do for everybody and that is what makes helping people with tinnitus so challenging.