We can try. Sometimes the cancer doesn't come back, and sometimes it does, and in no case do we understand why. This is not what most people mean by "cure".
Earnest curiosity - when someone is cured of cancer, and it comes back, is that different from me being cured of the flu and then catching the flu again later? Obviously it's different sorts of malady, but is it that the same cancer comes back, or is it just that if you had kidney cancer once, it's likely you might get it again? Or do we just not know enough about cancer to say/it varies on the sort of cancer?
It's not like being cured normally means "and you'll never get that again ever".
That’s kind of a flippant answer. I hope you know that viruses (particularly the herpes family) cause at least some forms of cancer and herpes is super transmissible and most people have some form (in particular familial herpes but also chicken pox). Can you catch it from riding a bus? Probably not. But I don’t think you were talking about literally from riding a bus but we don’t know if it’s a viral infection that’s untreated and has flare ups or if you can treat the viral infection and get reinfected. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s both - typically it’s a flare up but even if you cured the viral infection you could get reinfected and get cancer expressed again.
Yea, no shit. That's not the question I was asking. You can choose to be an annoying literalist, or you can be informative, or you can be quiet. You've chosen the least socially reasonable of them.
We're mostly talking about it coming back. A treatment might eliminate the vast amount of cancer cells, but some can be lying dormant and wake back up at some later time (and since they survived, the ones that are more resistant to treatment have been selected-- prognosis is then much worse the second time around). Or sometimes those "seeds" of recurrent cancer never awake.
Of course, people who get one cancer are, on average, more genetically and environmentally exposed to cancer risk. Cancer treatments themselves can even increase the risk of new cancer in some cases. So getting an entirely independent cancer is possible, too.
That was mostly what I had in mind. There's plenty of diseases where you're cured in the sense that your body can passively take care of it from here, but there's a chance it flares up again. I was unclear if most cancers were a "you got rid of it, but a different part of your kidney developed a cancer now" as compared to "that cancer you had before is back"
The general thinking is not that the cancer will hopefully stay dormant but there's a chance it will flare up in the future. The act of flaring up is what makes the tumor a malignant cancer as opposed to a benign cyst. A cancer cell is already flaring up by definition.
Rather, the usual model is that you physically extract the cancer, or you poison it, and you hope that you removed or killed all of the living cancer cells. If one is left, the cancer will grow back over time. This is why a metastatic cancer is so much worse than one that hasn't yet metastasized - after metastasis, cancer cells can be located pretty much anywhere in your body, but before metastasis, they are all localized to wherever the cancer originally developed, and if you remove enough tissue, it's plausible that you might get them all.
This model is somewhat in tension with (part of) the concept of partial remission, where the growth of a cancer becomes slower. But in such a case, it is even more obvious than usual that the cancer of the future is the same cancer as the cancer of the past, since we could observe it the whole time.
You might also consider the implications of the fact that the terminology for what appears to be a total absence of cancer is "cancer in remission". We say that because we can't know whether the cancer is actually gone. If it isn't gone, it will come back.
Sometimes you get better from a sickness, but it stays idle in your body and resurfaces later. If you get chickenpox as a child, it'll stay in you and eventually come back as shingles when you're an adult.
Others like herpes are lifelong afflictions whose symptoms can clear up, become inactive and eventually reactivate and flare up again.
I don't think we have very many treatments that are 100% efficacious and durable for most conditions, even ones that are generally considered curative.
If you take antibiotics-- sometimes it doesn't seem to work at all, and some other times the infection comes back after the cessation of treatment. This is true because of some reasons that are well-understood, and others that aren't.
Yes, most cancers are worse on these metrics than most uses of antibiotics, but not always ridiculously so. There are cancers with 5 year survival rates of >95%, and with very low recurrence rates after 5 years.
You could probably be possible to create an animal model by destroying some hearing cells/sensors in the ear.
As for creating a device to detect what the animal "hears", similar to how there's some research that used fmri with machine learning to "see dreams",it might be possible to do that for animal hearing.
I don't think that's a very good comparison. Cancer strikes at the very heart of what we are (a bunch of cells which are expected to cooperate and sometimes don't). Compared with that, tinnitus seems pretty hackable.
Baldness seems like a good comparison, though, given how hearing involves hair in the inner ear. Cancer is thousands of different disorders so it’s unlikely there will ever be a single cure; making hair grow where we want it is a simpler task.
Can't wait. With me it is ups-and-downs, at times it's great for months at a stretch and sometimes it is so bad I can't listen to music (or play).
There are many different forms of tinnitus and usually some mechanism or cure operates only on a fraction of all cases so I'm hoping that this is as broad as possible. Note to younger self: stay away from loud concerts.
Sorry to hear. You’re not alone and I’m constantly surprised to learn how many people I know are dealing with hearing concerns once I started talking about mine more.
My note to younger self is similar: get great earplugs and use them diligently.
A note of caution regarding earplugs: they can introduce infection, which in turn (I suspect) may play a role in triggering or causing tinnitus. It probably depends on individual predisposition and climate (to me it happened in hot humid environment), but I recommend caution.
I wish I could use earplugs (or IEM headphones with good sound isolation) a lot of the time, but I found out the hard way (after infection subsided I have intermittent tinnitus as well).
Have you been on antibiotics since you had it? If so, did it make it any worse?
I have a slight case of tinnitus and need to do a 2 week round of neomycin. Doctor says it shouldn't make it worse since it's a short course, but I'm still concerned/anxious about it.
It's been with me for 20+ years now, originally triggered by a concert in Paradiso in Amsterdam that I got free tickets to on account of repairing a bunch of cabling under the stage. The next day there was a really loud buzz on top of everything else that only slowly went away. After that it periodically recurred, usually right after exposure to some loud noise (especially: grinder, that one does it every time). I do what I can with ear protection to keep what I've got (which is a slowly losing battle), without any sound around me there is this very high pitched whine and with some low level masking sound that becomes manageable.
But e5 on the piano played loud is an instant trigger, that particular frequency is really not working for me. Never made any link with antibiotics but if I ever have to do a cure I'll be sure to pay attention. What mechanism are you concerned about? Is this a well known thing?
I think it's less of a concern for someone like you where it was brought on by loud noise vs someone like me where it's likely due to an imbalanced microbiome where taking antibiotics could potentially damage your microbiome further, leading to worsening tinnitus.
Do you have an audiologist regularly look at your ears? Obstruction and buildup can make tinnitus worse.
I find I really should wear earplugs way more often than I think. Putting dishes away, shoveling snow, scraping ice, even just running a sink. For everyday wear I cut down cheap foam plugs to ~half length (and reduce the depth of insertion), and I also wash them beforehand/periodically with plant-based soap. This removes additives in the foam which I find can cause skin irritation and reduce breathability.
> Do you have an audiologist regularly look at your ears?
I did in the past, haven't in years so thank you for the reminder, I really should do that. I think in part it is because I've simply given up on ever seeing an improvement, just a very slow rearguard fight.
You should be okay. I've found a couple of studies that have looked at groups of patients in the hundreds, with no worsening of hearing loss (and presumably, no worsening of tinnitus) [1][2]. Caveat is that both studies were done in kids, since they get more ear infections in general. Also, "topical ear drop medications containing gentamycin or neomycin do not appear to be ototoxic in humans unless the tympanic membrane (ear drum) is perforated" [3].
>Note to younger self: stay away from loud concerts.
Or try those "concert earplugs." They reduce the overall sound level while better preserving high and mid sounds. It also reduces the booming sound ('occlusion effect') when talking.
I paid $15 for a pair recently, but experimentation shows it's mostly just silicone earplugs with a hole through the center and a small mesh screen.
Removing the fancy "audio filter" and stuffing a tiny (tiny!) wisp of cotton in the hole seems to do the same thing, honestly. You can probably reproduce these using 30¢ HF silicone earplugs if you find a way to "drill" a hole through them...
good stuff, mate. it's been 8 goddamn years since my right ear ngiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiings all the time. I'm fine with waiting for another or two 8 years, but please, show some result. pretty please with cherry on top.
What I am saying is that know-it-all types, who have come full circle with this and demonstrate full spectrum brainwave mastery, may have developed tinnitus as a result of experiencing too much fight or flight while fervently enumerating their existential understanding of who they exactly are. But by all means downvote the statement for sloppy writing or your inability to draw the correlation.
Maybe they struggle with understanding inward facing hyper vigilance vs outward facing hyper vigilance and feel it is too dangerous of a word for a reasonable person to associate with.
do you think it had to do with earing because of the tinniuts? in this case you are disrespecting many americans who have cancers that are not ear based...
it was a joke contrasting our hyper modern tech niche with ancient wisdom from the vedas. I also eat ghee and cumin. no intention of it being an insult. Just people projecting
so after been in this community for a decade... i feel ashamed. I hope you downvote me so your essense is preserved. But this community is a failure ... and im glad i signed out based on what im seeing.
This is not the first story I have heard of health issues brought on by Kundalini yoga, it seems quite risky. It would be an interesting topic for rigorous study, could teach us about the mind body connection, but I wonder if it could be done in an ethical manner.
If I'm going to speculate wildly, given that tinnitus is linked to hearing loss, and can come from nerve damage, maybe the rising did somehow result in nerve damage? Hypoxia? Excitotoxicity?
I'm sorry for your tinnitus and for the loss of your father.
I've got multiple tones in both ears. Most of the time I don't notice it but sometimes... well it's hard not to panic when you realize you can't escape it. I would very much like to experience life without the ringing again before I kick the bucket. I'd honestly probably cry.
Facts. I used to take a lot for granted. Now I not only have tinnitus, but also muscularskeletal and digestion issues. I'd love to go back to being healthy again, but sometimes you're dealt a shit hand. And you never know what will happen tomorrow that will change the rest of your life.
It's almost always been there for me if a room is too quiet, but somehow it just doesn't bother me no matter how much I notice or think about it. It's just there.
I don't think I have tinnitus, but I made a bad choice of power supply for some of my audio equipment, and it emits an annoying whine from one of its fans. Which is bad because this is supposed to be audio equipment.
It's a MEAN WELL industrial power supply, brand new. I needed 12 volts DC to power a "car" amplifier, but it's not easy to get 50 amps of that from the wall. My guess is it's built for industrial automation, not audio equipment, but it's not like the other option of repurposed server PSUs would have been any quieter.
Removing the fan may or may not be relatively safe depending on how much airflow a 12 inch sub can push through a ported enclosure when it's running anywhere near full enough power to actually heat up the power supply.
I've had it for as long as I can remember, I suspect it's been there since birth. As a small child, I thought it was normal and that it was what the Simon & Garfunkel song "The Sound of Silence" was talking about. Anyway, I think I may be lucky in that I've never experienced not having it, so it doesn't bother me at all. It's just there.
Same here. The sound's always been there and it's the only thing I can control my attention towards perfectly. Kind of like how you can't not think about pink elephants but through a lifetime of practice I can do it with this one specific thing.
I recently bought a couple of audiomoths for monitoring or tracking birds passing through my area. It records up to 192kHz I think so it can pick up ultrasonic chirps from bats. Anyway while passing the recorded data into Audacity to search for bird calls I was able to finally nail down the bandwidth where my tinnitus overwhelms all other signal and to begin to understand the depth of my work-related hearing loss. I use the low and high pass filters to extract the signals across discrete frequencies and then track the level of gain I need to apply in order to be able to hear the calls that are in each extracted band. This is quite useful for me as before I knew that there are sounds I cannot hear unless there is almost no background noise but I had no idea where they were spectrally or just how much hearing loss I had in each band.
I could potentially use this information to design a hearing aid that boosts sounds in the affected bands so that I can hear them. I am not sure I can inverse filter the tinnitus-related noise since it is random intensity though a notch filter could be an option since it is narrow band.
I hope the tinnitus discovery thing in this article ends up being useful.
15.625KHz to be exact. I can hear this sound quite well, to the point where I prefer not to be in the same building as any CRT that emits it.
There are those that don't, mainly newer models I assume. I think it has to do with the exact shape of the waveform that drives the (horizontal part of the) deflection yoke. Some of them are noisier than others.
One of the power supplies I own makes a high-pitched whining sound from its fan. It's the most terrible, obnoxious sound, but I somehow don't mind it. It blends into the background after living in it for years. Still, when it goes away, there is nearly unparalleled silence.
Same. As a child, I could be reading a book at one end of the house and I would experience discomfort (experienced as a slightly painful "pressure" in my ears) when the television, which was 4 rooms away, was powered on. My family didn't believe that I could tell, because to them it was silent. So they challenged me to a double blind test, and were surprised to find that yes, it really was the TV that was bothering me.
Related, we did a hearing range test in a high school science class. I could detect the tone generator at a frequency well beyond what anyone else in my class could pick up. I couldn't hear it as a sound anymore after a certain point, but could still feel it as an uncomfortable "pressure" inside my ears.
Took me a while to realise that I could hear those, but also that I have tinnitus at the same level. For quite a while I assumed someone had turned one on nearby, until it dawned on me that no, I also have tinnitus
That reminds me of the old crt tv my parents had for ages in their room that i could hear from the other side of the house but they couldn't that made the most awful high pitch whine. and as the screen would go black in some sort of sleep mode but it kept making that horrible noise with the only indicator that is was on still other than the noise, that apparently only i and dogs could hear, was the color of a small dim recessed led. they got rid of it a about three years ago but whenever i would visit I'd hear it as soon as the door opened and it would drive me nuts till i got the chance to turn it off.
Most children can hear very high frequencies and it usually causes them discomfort. For a while it was actually used as a deterrent for loitering youth in the Netherlands (the "mosquito device"), which was terrible for me: as an adult I can not only still hear that, but it's almost unbearable.
Very old CRT monitors can have a similar effect, but they are usually not that loud. A friend once tried to test it using one of those "silent" ringtones for kids and I nearly destroyed his phone, without meaning to react so strongly.
Many years later a niece was able to ask an expert about this and he told her it's probably "cochlear hyperacusis", something that can make you overly sensitive to certain sounds or frequencies.
I do not have any other hearing issues, except for a single 20 second burst of tinnitus that will start loud and quickly taper off completely, which only happens maybe once every 6 months or so.
I am in my 30s and still hear frequency's over 16.5 kHz. I cant stand the high frequencies they are like auditory needles in my ears still. I know they say adults dont hears them but is that actually the case for most adults? I mean I have done enough it seems like I should have the hearing damage needed loud music on headphones, been in rock concert mosh pits, fired guns without hearing protection, fireworks, fired homemade cannons without hearing protection. But still hear everything fine
Hearing aids are much better than most earbuds, especially with regard to power consumption. I have tinnitus, mild hearing loss, but wear cheapish Costco hearing aids as earbud replacement and the hope my tinnitus won't progress.
The frequency response of a healthy ear isn't flat across all audible frequencies, so you'd need to reference normal hearing to determine the extent of damage rather than just looking at minimum audible db at various frequencies.
>I am not sure I can inverse filter the tinnitus-related noise since it is random intensity though a notch filter could be an option since it is narrow band.
Are you talking about basically using active noise canceling to silence tinitus? I don't think that's possible.
>The frequency response of a healthy ear isn't flat across all audible frequencies, so you'd need to reference normal hearing...
Isn't the normal frequency response of a healthy ear dependent on the shape of the ear cartilage and the configuration of the ear canal and the ear drum? It would be different for every individual. Kinda like how Mom could always hear everything we did and said after bedtime while Dad, without even using his selective hearing, wouldn't even know we were still awake.
>Are you talking about basically using active noise canceling to silence tinitus?
Yes. Model the tinnitus and design the inverse filter based on the bandwidth and inject that inverse filter to become an active subtraction of the tinnitus response. I know it probably isn't possible because the noise is variable and originates in the brain instead of external to the ear so it is not easily quantifiable therefore the inverse operator will not be exact, optimum, or anything else. However, if you can model the signal then you should be able to design the inverse operator. Since the signal is just a band-limited input there is no reason why you can't dink around until you have a close enough model to be able to design the inverse filter which you would then inject as an external input thru an earpiece or some other sound generator.
I'm a geophysicist with hearing problems, not an audiologist or otolaryngologist. It sounds reasonable to me. We deal with convolution/deconvolution and other signal processing as a regular part of the job process.
>Isn't the normal frequency response of a healthy ear dependent on the shape of the ear cartilage and the configuration of the ear canal and the ear drum? It would be different for every individual
Yes, there's some individual variation, but human ears are all generally roughly the same structure, so there are known baselines for how they work. There's about 40 dB difference in minimum audible threshold between 50 Hz and 5 kHz. Same with near the top end of the hearing range, though where exactly that lies is more subject to individual variation (and age)
>so it is not easily quantifiable therefore the inverse operator will not be exact, optimum, or anything else. However, if you can model the signal then you should be able to design the inverse operator.
It's not originating from actual sound, so I think the approach fundamentally doesn't apply. Active noise canceling relies on destructive interference to actually physically remove the sound before it is perceived. Once you have the nerve signal, I think there simply isn't an anti-sound that would result in some other nerve signal that adds up to perceived silence.
I've definitely read anecdotes about people with tinnitus listening to noise to reduce it. It may not be the same effect as destructive interference but it seems like there's something at work there.
As I understand it, for certain types of tinnitus, listening to a sound of the right frequency may temporarily suppress the tinnitus for some time afterwards. But the triggering sound is still audible, so it's not like noise canceling.
It's a great idea - and a more detailed diagnosis compared to what some professionals do. I had no idea audiomoths were a thing by the way! Will look into that.
I'm really liking these audiomoths. Broadband recording at high fidelity with long, unattended recording possible. I'm trying to see whether I can identify individual crows among a family of pecan-stealers active in my area. I almost have them accustomed to checking my porch for raw peanuts as part of their regular rotation. I probably need cameras to be able match the bird to the call and identify individual birds and I don't yet have that but I will in time. For now I am getting familiar with all the normal noises out here and the frequencies they occupy so that I can visually separate bird calls at various frequencies from ambulances, airplanes, helicopters, automobiles, barking dogs, etc so I can spend more time analyzing interesting signals from the birds out here.
If you have time to acquire a new hobby, an audiomoth is a great tool.
If you have Apple devices: There’s a free app called “Mimi - Hearing Test” that works together with Apple AirPods and allows you to test your hearing of different frequencies. From the results you can create a profile which you can then set in the iPhone’s accessibility settings so it will adjust the audio output of the AirPods accordingly.
Tinnitus is so strange. It’s like depression. You can’t will it away, but if you start to feel better it also gets better. And if you feel worse it gets worse. And both reinforce each other.
It’s not just perception and it’s not just physical. Physical symptoms make it seem worse and when it seems worse it actually gets worse.
The best thing to do is accept that you have it and try to never hear it, so that you don’t think about it. Then it might actually (not just psycholgicy) get better. It won’t be cured, but it can have a huge improvement.
Mine has gotten pretty bad it’s constant now. Before hitting the back of skull worked for a bit and listening to YouTube tinnitus scrubber worked but not anymore. Hoping this can be fixed one day.
Here's a very interesting study about how manual osteopathy on the temporal bones could help the auditory nerve/tinnitus. It's been a huge relief for me.
I've suffered from tinnitus that's gotten worse at times, and for me it definitely feels like there's some sort of nerve that's pinched or damaged because my hearing is totally fine but when certain muscles are tight in the area it gets louder, when I yawn it squeezes something and I get this loud tone, and sometimes it gets worse with pressure or impact. I had a very nasty and loud lower tone but I found physiotherapy around the neck and especially osteopathy around the temporal bone very, very effective in reducing/eliminating that lower tone. Osteopaths will talk about how if the temporal bone is stuck in rotation it can pinch/damage the auditory nerve. I don't fully understand the mechanics but whatever they do WORKS for me in taking away the loudest tone of tinnitus.
I told my doctor about this effect of yawning and he said that’s just a reflex, unrelated.
However my tinnitus started when they removed my wisdom teeth and that’s also when my TMJ started, so I’m pretty sure they are somehow related, and my tinnitus is generated by some kind of a bone/ligament alignment issue.
It’s very interesting what you said about ostheopathy, I would try it out except I’m afraid it can just as well make it worse as it can make it better if the ostheopath doesn’t know what they’re doing. At least that’s what dentists told me when I asked about if fixing my TMJ would fix my tinnitus.
Ya I also have had wisdom teeth removed and TMJ issues for a long time, and it also seems related. The nice thing about Osteopathy is that it's very gentle so it shouldn't be as dangerous as more aggressive or invasive treatments. Some Osteopaths are especially experienced with ear-related things. I've had very, very good results from it personally.
For me the biggest help has been that as well as general physio/exercises (especially eccentric neck muscle exercises with a exercise band) around the neck getting all hose muscles healthy and relaxed.
And for the resistant band thing, kind of like this video. But I put the resistance band in a door at a 90 degree angle to my head and I focus on the "eccentric" movment, slowly bringing it back into upright position and letting it pull the muscles and lengthen them.
> Here's a very interesting study about how manual osteopathy on the temporal bones could help the auditory nerve/tinnitus. It's been a huge relief for me.
Is this something that only a medical professional should do? If not, I’d love to see a video of this. I can’t figure out from the figures what one is supposed to do.
I got tinnitus in one ear after a fall where I hit my face hard on a table. After being careful with loud music my entire life this feels like a bummer. But accidents happen and it could have been worse. I also got some numbness in other parts of my face that slowly got better so I have some hope the tinnitus may improve.
Most people having a peeep tone tinnitus including myself can experience complete silence for a few seconds (up to 30) by listening to a tone at the specific frequency of their Tinnitus.
This is called residual inhibition.
You can Google "tinnitus residual inhibition" and find many papers about it.
Benzodiazepines work also very well in some cases, when taking them I have no Tinnitus at all, but that's ABSOLUTELY NOT a viable long term solution because of the long term negative effects.
I am not sure about this paper, but what I've read and believe the most is that the Tinnitus is caused by neurons in the brain, that have lost nerve input signals from the ear (due to hearing loss, nerve damage etc..), and start to emit parasite signals.
Benzodiazepines reduce the brain activity thus reducing/silencing the tinnitus. Residual inhibition seems to work by stimulating the region where the hearing loss has occurred, the neurons responsible for the Tinnitus all the sudden get stimulated and stop emitting noise signals for a few dozens of seconds then resume. But so far there is still a lot of research to be done and we are decades away from a cure that is SAFE enough. Benzos work but are just not worth it, this is like fighting back pain with opoids.
Until then I think it is best to protect our hearing, you can buy custom made earplugs which are comfortable to wear, last about 5 years and cost around 200 USD. I use them when I am in loud environments like on an air plane, train, at a bar etc...
Also it is best not be in completely silent environment as this is where you will notice the Tinnitus.
When listening to music with headphones it is important to take regular breaks and not to push the volume too high to give your ears some rest.
Edit: Last advice, don't try to listen to your tinnitus, but focus on other noises/sounds, if you are listening to the Tinnitus you are telling your brain that the signal is important, when you should be telling it, that it isn't.
My tinnitus has a very recent onset. So far it’s pretty mild but I expect it to get much worse. Your advise is the most practical, at least for mild cases: baby the ever living shit out of your hearing (I have spent decades in the underground metal scene and didn’t wear ear plugs until the past 5 or so years. What a colossally stupid thing to do. Please: if you’re young, remember you are not invincible, you’re merely borrowing heavily from future you) and avoid complete silence. I’ve also noticed that it will occasionally hit me hard in bursts. When that happens, I can make like I’m covering my ears with my palms and tap my finger tips on the back of my head for a few seconds and the roar will die down. Doesn’t go away permanently but so far it provides a little relief from those painful stabs.
Agree. I also made poor choices, drumming as a kid without hearing protection. By time I was in high school I already had tinnitus. Since then I’ve also babied my hearing (earplugs at concerts, playing music in headphones as quietly as possible or avoiding headphones), it’s fortunately stayed about the same over the ensuing years.
Given how spread tinnitus is, I wish there were more campaigns to help to spread awareness. Funny thing, ghe first gike I remember developing tinnitus, was following a evening where the fully pressurized soda stream bottle was not fully closes, so it emmitted this wheezing sound all evening, high pitched. I was too tired to figure out the source, or even if it was real up until the next morning.
Same story here. I'm pretty young and I'm quite concerned about it as I age, but since I stopped drumming about 10 years ago, it hasn't progressed at all.
Heh. I felt it so strongly that I built my own subwoofer. I get noise complaints if I set it anywhere near half volume. At least a transducer really helps, and doesn't often result in complaints.
Well if tinnituses arises from the brain not having an input, then it seems like the proper way to fix it is to restore the input. Now restoring damage to the nerve or those little hairs inside the ear, I'm sure that's tricky, but it also seems like it should be quite doable if you just throw resources at it.
Mammals cannot restore hearing, but other animals such as Chicken can.
A few years ago there was a drug called FX-322 that was able to regenerate inner ear hair cells in guinea pigs, it made it into human trials, but was unable to improve hearing, meaning that the cells were probably not functional.
It was shown in a couple of papers that we can restore hair cells in mammals. Damaged hair cells are the root cause for the majority of people with hearing loss & tinnitus. The most promising path seems to use so called supporting cells in the inner ear and convert them into hair cells. Researchers are getting closer and closer every year. I think we are now at a point where it's not a question of if but rather when.
Here is a quote from one of the leading scientist in the field:
What is needed to help make HRP goals happen?
Frankly, funding to keep our research moving forward. A postdoctoral fellow with five to six years of training starts out on a modest salary of about $45,000, plus $12,000 in benefits. So that’s $57,000 before they even pick up a test tube in the lab. Each person will typically use between $15,000- $20,000 a year in supplies and chemicals. Simply maintaining a single cage of mice for one year costs $210, and my lab can use between 300-500 cages of mice for our experiments! HHF and its donors have been extremely generous in their support, however with additional funding the output from the consortium could be significantly greater and accelerate the pace to a cure.
Overall the field of hearing restoration still only receives tiny amounts of funding (<200 Mio). The research is in a vacuum phase. It's not proven out enough for Big Pharma to come. Relying on small government grants makes it difficult to get the research to a stage where it's attractive enough for Big Pharma.
Best bet at this point is probably when a former big tech executives would get hearing loss/tinnitus and then decides to put real money behind the problem. Bryan Johnson who created the Blueprint program has hearing loss but I guess he is not wealthy enough to make a difference.
EDIT (to put numbers into perspective):
The size of the problem:
Sensorineural hearing loss disables over 360 million people worldwide. Irrespective of its cause and severity, hearing loss can have a large impact on people’s health and well-being. The treatment of hearing loss is currently limited to the use of hearing aids or devices surgically implanted in the middle or inner ear. These devices often perform poorly in noisy environments and can be very costly. It has been estimated that the costs of untreated hearing loss are €213 billion in Europe alone each year.
The funding (EU):
An international consortium of 7 partners has been awarded a €5,8 million European Commission Horizon 2020 grant to develop and test a new drug to treat hearing loss caused by the loss of sensory hair cells.
> Most people having a peeep tone tinnitus including myself can experience complete silence for a few seconds (up to 30) by listening to a tone at the specific frequency of their Tinnitus.
What "works for me" but your kilometrage may vary...
i listen to LOTS of white noise. All night when i sleep, when i'm out and about and might normally listen to music, and sometimes just randomly throughout the day.
For whatever reason, listening to white noise over long periods seems to tone down the volume of my beeping, _sometimes_ to the point where i have blessed silence for several days at a time (recently a full 2 weeks, though that was a new record in my 13-ish years of beeping).
Whether or not the white noise _genuinely_ plays a factor is difficult to say, but it's been my experience, the past three or four years, that the volume of The Beep and the duration of the rare Quiet Periods seems to be affected by how how much white noise i listen to.
(Sidebar: "quiet" is never quite silent, but The Beep sometimes (thankfully) fades to the point where i have to actively listen to hear it, exactly as it was when this all started out around 2010.)
(Sidebar: though the tone of my beep is near-constant, wavering only very slightly, the volume varies wildly, from minor background noise to headache-inducing and concentration-shattering.)
That said: "white noise" is a generic term here. i often get better results with what my phone's white noise app call "pink noise" or "blue noise" - they're just different frequencies of the same style of noise.
Edit: FWIW, i've heard from two other tinnitus sufferers that white noise has a similar effect on them. That doesn't mean that it definitely helps, but it seems to help for some of us.
My tinnitus, both the one that's always present and the one I can provoke with my jaw muscles, is not a single-pitched tone but more like band-limited noise. I did a hearing test and we tried to match it to various frequencies. None of the models they had really fit, but the best one was a sort of moderately-wise noise.
I've always assumed the tinnitus arises from some sort of AGC, automatic gain control, in the auditory system, such that when something is damaged and the signal disappears, the brain will just turn up the gain until the noise is about the level it expects the signal to be.
At least my experience with AGC is that it's useless because times of silence ends up just being filled with noise... "audio system tinnitus..."
I tried the YouTube video and was slightly alarmed to discover that I appear to be deaf above about 13.5KHz. I wondered if it might be the frequency response of my laptop speakers, but according to this site [0] it's pretty flat up to 20KHz.
It didn't make the tinitius go away, but perhaps subdued it slightly. Hard to say.
But if as one of the other posters suggests tinnitus is a neurological response to lack of input, deafness in higher frequencies tallies. Like others though, jutting my jaw forward makes the tinnitus louder, so not sure how that interaction works for something originated in the brain.
Something I haven't seen mentioned here is _very_ occasional short periods (seconds) of apparent deafness, typically at night, in a quiet room, and only when very tired or sleep deprived. I say apparent because since it's quiet, it's hard to know if it's the tinnitus momentarily stopping, or all sound; and the presence of sound may prevent it from happening.
I have tinnitus. I had brain surgery to remove an acoustic schwannoma. The doctor said that I would lose all hearing in the ear due to the unavoidable damage to the acoustic nerve.
Well, at least that will get rid of the tinnitus, I thought.
No such luck! I still have tinnitus.
As such I think there may be more to tinnitus than undetected nerve damage.
It isn’t clear cut though: I have some hearing in that ear after all (to the surprise of the doctor). But the tinnitus came back (or never went away) before any hearing returned.
You are not the only one, in fact removing acoustic nerve is known not to fix the tinnitus / sometimes making it worse. The research has has shown so far that it appears the Tinnitus is coming from within the brain, neurons that have lost the input signal from the acoustic nerve aren't stimulated anymore and in response start to emit noise signals on their own.
I have the same tumor on the auditory nerve on both sides (NF2). Had surgery on one side. Lost full hearing on that side (so auditory nerve almost fully severed). Always had tinnitus but after surgery it's gotten much worse on that side. Not unbearable but a constant source of noise. I can see there being some sort of connection between the nerve and tinnitus.
My dad had one of those. They used to be called acoustic neuromas. He lost hearing in one ear because of the lack of microneurosurgey at the time and the way it was wrapped around CN 8.
I have tinnitus and strangely, I have no real idea when it started, much less what caused it. Maybe it just started softly and got louder. I think it appeared in my early 20s, couldn't swear that it didn't start way before then, and I'm pretty sure it was there when I was about 30. It seems strange somehow that I just don't actually know.
I've had Tinnitus since I was 14 (when I went to a concert and stood in front of the speakers).
A couple of pieces of advice to people who might be struggling with their tinnitus:
1. You need to learn to cope with it - once you're used to it, it will mostly fade into the background and be manageable. Accepting that it'll never be silent again was very difficult, but that's the only thing hat helped me feel better in the end.
2. Wear ear plugs when it gets too loud! It's too easy to get irreversible damage to your hearing, and that's the only thing you can really do - prevent it.
Curiously, yesterday I woke up at night because the tinnitus had gotten louder again - stupidly, I played drums the other day at a jam session without earplugs. I could punch myself for that one, and see it as (yet another) wakeup call to be more careful.
Prolonged exposure to loud sounds, short extremely loud sounds (explosions), ototoxic drugs (some antibiotics, chemo..) and substances (toluene..) and viral infections that spread into inner ear can all cause cochlear damage and therefore tinnitus.
Covid vaccines do sometimes lead to increased tinnitus symptoms. But you can’t draw any conclusions from that, because getting COVID often leads to increased tinnitus. I’m not sure whether it’s known yet, but it very well may be that on balance there are fewer cases of tinnitus associated with the vaccine than with the virus. Also, BTW, flu vaccines and catching the flu both have reports of tinnitus increase. My theory: any inflammation event may be likely to increase tinnitus symptoms.
What difference does it make if covid causes it? Most people took the vaccine, pretty much everybody got covid anyway. The vaccine was voluntary (with a lot of unethical coercion).
What do you mean what difference does it make? Isn’t it clear that you cannot attribute tinnitus to the covid vaccine, if the covid virus (or any virus, or any vaccine) causes tinnitus as much or more often than the vaccine does?
If the per-capita rate of onset tinnitus symptoms when getting the vaccine is lower than the rate of onset tinnitus when catching covid, then the vaccine isn’t just not implicated, it’s effectively helpful at reducing tinnitus, as a byproduct of reducing cases and/or severity of covid illness.
Pretty much everyone got covid anyway. The vaccine was an unnecessary intervention that didn't do anything to stop covid and caused harm to many people. Just admit you were conned into taking it.
Haven't you noticed, after smearing, slandering and discriminating against those who chose not to take it, there is very little interest in following up with comparisons between the two groups? You would have expected scientists to be really interested in comparing the groups considering it was done under Trump's operation warp speed, and used a novel technology never before approved for human use. Instead the vaccine free are ignored. Tells me all I need to know.
I haven’t had covid, as far as I know. Of course I saw the recommendations to get the vaccine, but I didn’t see any smearing or slandering or conning, I don’t know what you’re referring to. The company I work for did allow vaccinated people to return to work before unvaccinated people, and to me that seemed like a prudent choice at the time, but the vaccine requirement was dropped at my work a long time ago. I’m sorry that your choice had unfairly negative consequences for you, especially if you felt bullied.
Please keep in mind that it doesn’t really matter if a lot of vaccinated people still got covid later. That was expected, because the ‘vaccine’ was not a covid cure. If the spread was slowed and the symptoms were reduced significantly, then the vaccine was successful. There has been lots of science on the unvaccinated, and it found that they died and were hospitalized from covid at much higher rates than vaccinated people. I believe there is plenty of science still happening on the secondary effects of the vaccine, so being unaware of it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. I’m not aware of “harm to many people” who took the vaccine. What harm are you referring to, and how many people were harmed, exactly? Did that harm happen less often or more often than to people who got covid? Just like with tinnitus, you can’t take anecdotes out of context when it happens to someone vaccinated if you don’t compare it to people who weren’t vaccinated.
BTW, while the covid vaccine was an untested vaccine at first (like all vaccines before trials), it did go through trials and it was not untested technology. mRNA therapies had been used in other non-covid trials for a decade, and tested against other infectious diseases for several years before the covid vaccine was developed. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7956899/
Think about it: at this point, we have more data on the effects of the covid vaccine than almost any other vaccine or drug in all of human history. Concerns about it being untested did maybe make sense in March of 2020, but it has now been thoroughly tested and so those concerns don’t make that much sense to hold on to anymore, right?
So I take it you weren’t very interested in talking about tinnitus?
And yes it does matter that people caught covid after as we were promised the opposite. Some people lost everything as a result of the totalitarian lockdowns so we could wait on the savior of a vaccine that turned out to b a complete failure. Some people lost their lives to the useless "vaccine".
No mRNA product had ever been approved for human us despite the decades of research. Why not?
And these "vaccines" caused tinnitus in many people, so it is relevant.
You’re talking about tabloid journalism?? The CNN link has no smearing, slandering or discrimination. It simply recommends the vaccine and says there are consequences to not taking it, which is true. It certainly has a lean toward recommending the vaccine, and it’s true that there could be consequences to taking it. That’s just a bit of bias, not slander or smear. Do you have personal experience that’s making you upset about the Covid vaccine?
Yes the vaccine might be relevant to tinnitus, and like I said Covid and the flu and catching a cold has also lead to many many people saying those things caused tinnitus. Claiming the vaccine itself is the direct cause of the tinnitus is unjustified and therefore misleading. If the cause is inflammation, then anything that causes inflammation can lead to tinnitus, whether it’s a vaccine or catching a flu or hitting your head. The tinnitus may have nothing to do with the Covid vaccine specifically, it may be nothing more than a byproduct of activating your immune system.
I got vaccinated three times (with Pfizer). No ill effects on my hearing/tinnitus (I was monitoring it). Then I got COVID (Omicron), was quite sick for several days (lost smell) and it seems the tinnitus worsened a bit in one ear. So... your mileage may vary, as with everything.
They do make the tinnitus more noticeable for sure! By blocking out sounds which would otherwise “mask” the tinnitus, it can become noticeable if it’s otherwise pretty quiet. But in conditions where you really need earplugs I think you still won’t really notice it that much when wearing earplugs (very loud situations).
I had the ever common thinking it was caused by a visit to the dentist or the antibiotics that were prescribed. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t.
It was also possibly when I walked behind a server rack and the fans were blowing air and the sound from the fans were loud, both into my ears. This could could have caused the damage that caused the tinnitus.
Took about two days to kick in fully. Tinnitus started, then stoped. Then started like it wanted to kick in fully and then stopped. Then started and never left.
99% of the time I never notice it. 1% of the time I do notice.
I also think it has something to do with neck pain and the muscles behind the head and around the neck. If I sleep in the wrong position and get a sore neck, then the tinnitus is crazy loud.
I remember thinking my life would never be the same. I was stuck with this forever. Pretty traumatic event. To anyone else out there, please find comfort that you’ll get used to it. You won’t notice it. It’s not the end of the world. Don’t stress. You’ll be fine.
I’m surprised more people haven’t mentioned noise canceling headphones as a possible cause. There was an HN thread about this awhile back. This has been mentioned on many forums, google it.
My tinnitus (from a single loud party), which I had before noise canceling headphones, gets worse with noise canceling headphones, but only temporarily, like 2 or 3 days.
I found out as well that my headphones plays my own voice back to me so that I dont shout, but was able to turn that off in the settings (Jabra 2), which seems to help.
I have tinnitus which I managed to cure(almost. In complete silence I still can hear a teapot-like sound but the original single tone high volume sound is no more).
Turns out it’s about my neck. I religiously paid attention to my neck position and fixed my posture, and as a result, my tinnitus gradually disappeared.
If I sit in a bad position or sometimes do some weird move, my tinnitus can return but I immediately start a neck massage and fix my posture, and it goes away. Sometimes it can be very severe and lower volume version remains, but it goes away the next day.
I think it happened because I used to move my head forward when sitting in front of a screen. There are chiropractors, who claim to fix tinnitus by fixing the head position and say that it’s associated with some nerve in the neck.
IIRC, when I was trying to mask the sound with the shower I noticed that it's not working when the water is cold or when I'm not comfortably under it. Then I had a few days of road trip without the laptop and noticed improvement when I was driving, sitting up straight.
So I decided to work on this and bought a keyboard and a mouse and made myself a rule that I will always use the laptop with a stand or external display so I don't lean over the laptop and sit straight up the way it is ergonomically recommended, pretty much like it says on articles like this: https://healthandbalance.com.au/workstation-desk-posture-erg...
I also begin doing neck exercises, recommended to me by an orthopedist(I got some neck pain for a few days, the orthopedist gave me a couple of movement I should do regularly to increase the straight of my neck muscles, I will leave links to the leaflets of the movements). I also did the push the chin to push your head back movement because although I didn't have clinically severe situation with my head moving forward I noticed that on my old photos my head wasn't leaning forward that much.
After a week or so after I started sitting right, my tinnitus begin to improve rapidly. I even began sleeping the orthopedically correct way and avoiding any stress positions. After some time I tried experimenting stress positions, like using the laptop the way I used to and the tinnitus returned in full force until I fix the posture and do some massages. After a year or two the tinnitus was almost completely gone and stress positions don't immediately bring it back anymore so I can use laptop again but if I'm not careful and overdo it, get carried away and lean into the screen it returns.
2) It says this is exercise for strengthening the muscles. Each of these should be repeated 3 times.
a) Put your hands on your forehead, try to move your head forward as you push back against it with your hands. Do this for 10 seconds and release.
b) The same but this time to back
c) The same but to the sides
d) Hold your head with your hands, one on the forehead and one on the back of your head. Try to rotate your head but stop it with your hands, do this for 10 seconds in both directions.
e) You hold your hands in the shown positions and push against, one hand pushes against the other. The illustration is not very clear but basically you start from the lower position and go higher. After the push, you do the same but this time you hold your hands and stretch.
3) Is for preserving your ability to move. You repeat each one 5 times.
a) You look left by rotating your head, wait 3 seconds the look forward. Then do the same to the other direction.
b) You lean your head until your chin touches your chest and wait 3 seconds, then look straight again but don't push it too much. Then the same but to the back.
c) The same idea but to the sides. Try to lean your head until your ear touches your shoulder but don't push it too much.
d) You rotate your head as much as you can, wait 3 seconds and go back. Then to the other direction. Don't push it too much. Do this 3 times but it's not recommended for old people.
e) Lift your shoulders up and try to get them close to each other at the back. Hold 3 seconds, then go back to the starting position. Do this 10 times.
Oh it's nothing formal, I just try to avoid any stress to my spine. That is, I don't sleep in strange positions that I used to sleep and I changed my bed to a stiffer one because the old one was deforming too much by my weight and this was causing my sleeping position to be slightly curved.
I also looked around the internet for recommendations but they all converge the idea that you shouldn't be forcing your spine to stay in a curved position beyond the natural curve for too long.
For me it's about tightness in the SCM (Sternocleidomastoid muscle) and scalene muscles. If I can successfully get them to loosen up through some heat and massage, I can make my neck pop (very loudly in fact, sometimes it makes my arm go numb for a second) and whamo, tinnitus gone. It returns as soon as the neck stiffness/tightness comes back though.
I had tinnitus my entire life and it’s really annoying. I always thought everyone had it too, until I found out they didn’t, which, in a way, was even more annoying. At the same, I can say my hearing is pretty sharp. I often hear sounds that are too subtle or far away for others to hear. So I’m not sure if in my case the ringing has to do with hearing loss. But I’d be so happy to give anything a shot
I can hear ringing in dead silence, and if I pay close attention I can hear it without silence, too. But some say that's just blood flowing, and real tinnitus is much more obvious.
Regardless, I can't escape it either. If I focus on it, I can make myself dissociate from the pain.
I have a relatively minor tinnitus, which I thought was caused by my drum lessons in my early twenties.
But when I tried to remember it, I always heard something like a tinnitus sound (albeit quieter) whenever I closed my ears with my hands since my childhood, during which I was never exposed to any loud music or sound.
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[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 327 ms ] threadolder report (2016) from one of the authors: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27108594/
planned study: https://oto.hms.harvard.edu/news/dr-zheng-yi-chen-named-prin...
I’ve just accepted that there won’t be a cure anytime soon, and come to terms with it.
Would love to be proven wrong, but I think they’ll find a cure for tinnitus when they can cure baldness and cancer.
We can try. Sometimes the cancer doesn't come back, and sometimes it does, and in no case do we understand why. This is not what most people mean by "cure".
It's not like being cured normally means "and you'll never get that again ever".
Of course, people who get one cancer are, on average, more genetically and environmentally exposed to cancer risk. Cancer treatments themselves can even increase the risk of new cancer in some cases. So getting an entirely independent cancer is possible, too.
Rather, the usual model is that you physically extract the cancer, or you poison it, and you hope that you removed or killed all of the living cancer cells. If one is left, the cancer will grow back over time. This is why a metastatic cancer is so much worse than one that hasn't yet metastasized - after metastasis, cancer cells can be located pretty much anywhere in your body, but before metastasis, they are all localized to wherever the cancer originally developed, and if you remove enough tissue, it's plausible that you might get them all.
This model is somewhat in tension with (part of) the concept of partial remission, where the growth of a cancer becomes slower. But in such a case, it is even more obvious than usual that the cancer of the future is the same cancer as the cancer of the past, since we could observe it the whole time.
You might also consider the implications of the fact that the terminology for what appears to be a total absence of cancer is "cancer in remission". We say that because we can't know whether the cancer is actually gone. If it isn't gone, it will come back.
Others like herpes are lifelong afflictions whose symptoms can clear up, become inactive and eventually reactivate and flare up again.
Cancers can be like that too.
If you take antibiotics-- sometimes it doesn't seem to work at all, and some other times the infection comes back after the cessation of treatment. This is true because of some reasons that are well-understood, and others that aren't.
Yes, most cancers are worse on these metrics than most uses of antibiotics, but not always ridiculously so. There are cancers with 5 year survival rates of >95%, and with very low recurrence rates after 5 years.
As for creating a device to detect what the animal "hears", similar to how there's some research that used fmri with machine learning to "see dreams",it might be possible to do that for animal hearing.
Other than that nitpick, sure.
There are many different forms of tinnitus and usually some mechanism or cure operates only on a fraction of all cases so I'm hoping that this is as broad as possible. Note to younger self: stay away from loud concerts.
My note to younger self is similar: get great earplugs and use them diligently.
I wish I could use earplugs (or IEM headphones with good sound isolation) a lot of the time, but I found out the hard way (after infection subsided I have intermittent tinnitus as well).
Phrasing…
I have a slight case of tinnitus and need to do a 2 week round of neomycin. Doctor says it shouldn't make it worse since it's a short course, but I'm still concerned/anxious about it.
But e5 on the piano played loud is an instant trigger, that particular frequency is really not working for me. Never made any link with antibiotics but if I ever have to do a cure I'll be sure to pay attention. What mechanism are you concerned about? Is this a well known thing?
I find I really should wear earplugs way more often than I think. Putting dishes away, shoveling snow, scraping ice, even just running a sink. For everyday wear I cut down cheap foam plugs to ~half length (and reduce the depth of insertion), and I also wash them beforehand/periodically with plant-based soap. This removes additives in the foam which I find can cause skin irritation and reduce breathability.
Hope you get some relief.
I did in the past, haven't in years so thank you for the reminder, I really should do that. I think in part it is because I've simply given up on ever seeing an improvement, just a very slow rearguard fight.
[1]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16890085/
[2]https://doi.org/10.1177/019459989310900114
[3]https://doi.org/10.4103/0971-7749.161014
Or try those "concert earplugs." They reduce the overall sound level while better preserving high and mid sounds. It also reduces the booming sound ('occlusion effect') when talking.
I paid $15 for a pair recently, but experimentation shows it's mostly just silicone earplugs with a hole through the center and a small mesh screen.
Removing the fancy "audio filter" and stuffing a tiny (tiny!) wisp of cotton in the hole seems to do the same thing, honestly. You can probably reproduce these using 30¢ HF silicone earplugs if you find a way to "drill" a hole through them...
I have tinnitus and it SUCKS. The people who threw the outdoor music festivals I went to in my 20s should be brought to trial...
You'll wanna grind leetcode 'reds' with extra ghee and cumin to ground your muladhara sub-routine
If I'm going to speculate wildly, given that tinnitus is linked to hearing loss, and can come from nerve damage, maybe the rising did somehow result in nerve damage? Hypoxia? Excitotoxicity?
I'm sorry for your tinnitus and for the loss of your father.
I may simply remove that fan in the future.
Removing the fan may or may not be relatively safe depending on how much airflow a 12 inch sub can push through a ported enclosure when it's running anywhere near full enough power to actually heat up the power supply.
Unless I'm actively thinking about it (like now), most of the time it's nt an issue, and it's quiet enough to be easily drowned out.
Couldn't sleep. Couldn't do my job. Forced to take extended time off. Terrorized by the possibility that I would never be able to work again.
Closet I've ever come to suicide.
I could potentially use this information to design a hearing aid that boosts sounds in the affected bands so that I can hear them. I am not sure I can inverse filter the tinnitus-related noise since it is random intensity though a notch filter could be an option since it is narrow band.
I hope the tinnitus discovery thing in this article ends up being useful.
There are those that don't, mainly newer models I assume. I think it has to do with the exact shape of the waveform that drives the (horizontal part of the) deflection yoke. Some of them are noisier than others.
I like the sound and can hear when a shop has a CRT security camera when I walk past lol
Related, we did a hearing range test in a high school science class. I could detect the tone generator at a frequency well beyond what anyone else in my class could pick up. I couldn't hear it as a sound anymore after a certain point, but could still feel it as an uncomfortable "pressure" inside my ears.
Very old CRT monitors can have a similar effect, but they are usually not that loud. A friend once tried to test it using one of those "silent" ringtones for kids and I nearly destroyed his phone, without meaning to react so strongly.
Many years later a niece was able to ask an expert about this and he told her it's probably "cochlear hyperacusis", something that can make you overly sensitive to certain sounds or frequencies.
I do not have any other hearing issues, except for a single 20 second burst of tinnitus that will start loud and quickly taper off completely, which only happens maybe once every 6 months or so.
The longer you wait with getting it, the harder it will be for your brain to adjust to processing the full corrected sounds.
>I am not sure I can inverse filter the tinnitus-related noise since it is random intensity though a notch filter could be an option since it is narrow band.
Are you talking about basically using active noise canceling to silence tinitus? I don't think that's possible.
Isn't the normal frequency response of a healthy ear dependent on the shape of the ear cartilage and the configuration of the ear canal and the ear drum? It would be different for every individual. Kinda like how Mom could always hear everything we did and said after bedtime while Dad, without even using his selective hearing, wouldn't even know we were still awake.
>Are you talking about basically using active noise canceling to silence tinitus?
Yes. Model the tinnitus and design the inverse filter based on the bandwidth and inject that inverse filter to become an active subtraction of the tinnitus response. I know it probably isn't possible because the noise is variable and originates in the brain instead of external to the ear so it is not easily quantifiable therefore the inverse operator will not be exact, optimum, or anything else. However, if you can model the signal then you should be able to design the inverse operator. Since the signal is just a band-limited input there is no reason why you can't dink around until you have a close enough model to be able to design the inverse filter which you would then inject as an external input thru an earpiece or some other sound generator.
I'm a geophysicist with hearing problems, not an audiologist or otolaryngologist. It sounds reasonable to me. We deal with convolution/deconvolution and other signal processing as a regular part of the job process.
Yes, there's some individual variation, but human ears are all generally roughly the same structure, so there are known baselines for how they work. There's about 40 dB difference in minimum audible threshold between 50 Hz and 5 kHz. Same with near the top end of the hearing range, though where exactly that lies is more subject to individual variation (and age)
>so it is not easily quantifiable therefore the inverse operator will not be exact, optimum, or anything else. However, if you can model the signal then you should be able to design the inverse operator.
It's not originating from actual sound, so I think the approach fundamentally doesn't apply. Active noise canceling relies on destructive interference to actually physically remove the sound before it is perceived. Once you have the nerve signal, I think there simply isn't an anti-sound that would result in some other nerve signal that adds up to perceived silence.
If you have time to acquire a new hobby, an audiomoth is a great tool.
It’s not just perception and it’s not just physical. Physical symptoms make it seem worse and when it seems worse it actually gets worse.
The best thing to do is accept that you have it and try to never hear it, so that you don’t think about it. Then it might actually (not just psycholgicy) get better. It won’t be cured, but it can have a huge improvement.
https://norcaloa.com/CAOT/articles-in-press/CAOT-101018
I've suffered from tinnitus that's gotten worse at times, and for me it definitely feels like there's some sort of nerve that's pinched or damaged because my hearing is totally fine but when certain muscles are tight in the area it gets louder, when I yawn it squeezes something and I get this loud tone, and sometimes it gets worse with pressure or impact. I had a very nasty and loud lower tone but I found physiotherapy around the neck and especially osteopathy around the temporal bone very, very effective in reducing/eliminating that lower tone. Osteopaths will talk about how if the temporal bone is stuck in rotation it can pinch/damage the auditory nerve. I don't fully understand the mechanics but whatever they do WORKS for me in taking away the loudest tone of tinnitus.
It’s very interesting what you said about ostheopathy, I would try it out except I’m afraid it can just as well make it worse as it can make it better if the ostheopath doesn’t know what they’re doing. At least that’s what dentists told me when I asked about if fixing my TMJ would fix my tinnitus.
For me the biggest help has been that as well as general physio/exercises (especially eccentric neck muscle exercises with a exercise band) around the neck getting all hose muscles healthy and relaxed.
https://1drv.ms/b/s!AkOl7L0amzk1gZJkufVhfYr8q1vtbw?e=tjuBWD
And for the resistant band thing, kind of like this video. But I put the resistance band in a door at a 90 degree angle to my head and I focus on the "eccentric" movment, slowly bringing it back into upright position and letting it pull the muscles and lengthen them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EG7z_qsYNY&ab_channel=Rehab...
> https://norcaloa.com/CAOT/articles-in-press/CAOT-101018
Is this something that only a medical professional should do? If not, I’d love to see a video of this. I can’t figure out from the figures what one is supposed to do.
For example listen to the following, at a level that it isn't uncomfortable and your Tinnitus might be gone for a short time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNf9nzvnd1k
This is called residual inhibition. You can Google "tinnitus residual inhibition" and find many papers about it.
Benzodiazepines work also very well in some cases, when taking them I have no Tinnitus at all, but that's ABSOLUTELY NOT a viable long term solution because of the long term negative effects.
I am not sure about this paper, but what I've read and believe the most is that the Tinnitus is caused by neurons in the brain, that have lost nerve input signals from the ear (due to hearing loss, nerve damage etc..), and start to emit parasite signals.
Benzodiazepines reduce the brain activity thus reducing/silencing the tinnitus. Residual inhibition seems to work by stimulating the region where the hearing loss has occurred, the neurons responsible for the Tinnitus all the sudden get stimulated and stop emitting noise signals for a few dozens of seconds then resume. But so far there is still a lot of research to be done and we are decades away from a cure that is SAFE enough. Benzos work but are just not worth it, this is like fighting back pain with opoids.
Until then I think it is best to protect our hearing, you can buy custom made earplugs which are comfortable to wear, last about 5 years and cost around 200 USD. I use them when I am in loud environments like on an air plane, train, at a bar etc...
Also it is best not be in completely silent environment as this is where you will notice the Tinnitus.
When listening to music with headphones it is important to take regular breaks and not to push the volume too high to give your ears some rest.
Edit: Last advice, don't try to listen to your tinnitus, but focus on other noises/sounds, if you are listening to the Tinnitus you are telling your brain that the signal is important, when you should be telling it, that it isn't.
(of course a reference to https://www.livescience.com/what-is-call-of-the-void)
This seems promising? https://hms.harvard.edu/news/scientists-regenerate-hair-cell...
It was shown in a couple of papers that we can restore hair cells in mammals. Damaged hair cells are the root cause for the majority of people with hearing loss & tinnitus. The most promising path seems to use so called supporting cells in the inner ear and convert them into hair cells. Researchers are getting closer and closer every year. I think we are now at a point where it's not a question of if but rather when.
Here is a quote from one of the leading scientist in the field:
What is needed to help make HRP goals happen? Frankly, funding to keep our research moving forward. A postdoctoral fellow with five to six years of training starts out on a modest salary of about $45,000, plus $12,000 in benefits. So that’s $57,000 before they even pick up a test tube in the lab. Each person will typically use between $15,000- $20,000 a year in supplies and chemicals. Simply maintaining a single cage of mice for one year costs $210, and my lab can use between 300-500 cages of mice for our experiments! HHF and its donors have been extremely generous in their support, however with additional funding the output from the consortium could be significantly greater and accelerate the pace to a cure.
Link: https://hearinghealthfoundation.org/spotlight/groves
Overall the field of hearing restoration still only receives tiny amounts of funding (<200 Mio). The research is in a vacuum phase. It's not proven out enough for Big Pharma to come. Relying on small government grants makes it difficult to get the research to a stage where it's attractive enough for Big Pharma.
Best bet at this point is probably when a former big tech executives would get hearing loss/tinnitus and then decides to put real money behind the problem. Bryan Johnson who created the Blueprint program has hearing loss but I guess he is not wealthy enough to make a difference.
EDIT (to put numbers into perspective):
The size of the problem: Sensorineural hearing loss disables over 360 million people worldwide. Irrespective of its cause and severity, hearing loss can have a large impact on people’s health and well-being. The treatment of hearing loss is currently limited to the use of hearing aids or devices surgically implanted in the middle or inner ear. These devices often perform poorly in noisy environments and can be very costly. It has been estimated that the costs of untreated hearing loss are €213 billion in Europe alone each year.
The funding (EU): An international consortium of 7 partners has been awarded a €5,8 million European Commission Horizon 2020 grant to develop and test a new drug to treat hearing loss caused by the loss of sensory hair cells.
What "works for me" but your kilometrage may vary...
i listen to LOTS of white noise. All night when i sleep, when i'm out and about and might normally listen to music, and sometimes just randomly throughout the day.
For whatever reason, listening to white noise over long periods seems to tone down the volume of my beeping, _sometimes_ to the point where i have blessed silence for several days at a time (recently a full 2 weeks, though that was a new record in my 13-ish years of beeping).
Whether or not the white noise _genuinely_ plays a factor is difficult to say, but it's been my experience, the past three or four years, that the volume of The Beep and the duration of the rare Quiet Periods seems to be affected by how how much white noise i listen to.
(Sidebar: "quiet" is never quite silent, but The Beep sometimes (thankfully) fades to the point where i have to actively listen to hear it, exactly as it was when this all started out around 2010.)
(Sidebar: though the tone of my beep is near-constant, wavering only very slightly, the volume varies wildly, from minor background noise to headache-inducing and concentration-shattering.)
That said: "white noise" is a generic term here. i often get better results with what my phone's white noise app call "pink noise" or "blue noise" - they're just different frequencies of the same style of noise.
Edit: FWIW, i've heard from two other tinnitus sufferers that white noise has a similar effect on them. That doesn't mean that it definitely helps, but it seems to help for some of us.
At least my experience with AGC is that it's useless because times of silence ends up just being filled with noise... "audio system tinnitus..."
It didn't make the tinitius go away, but perhaps subdued it slightly. Hard to say.
But if as one of the other posters suggests tinnitus is a neurological response to lack of input, deafness in higher frequencies tallies. Like others though, jutting my jaw forward makes the tinnitus louder, so not sure how that interaction works for something originated in the brain.
Something I haven't seen mentioned here is _very_ occasional short periods (seconds) of apparent deafness, typically at night, in a quiet room, and only when very tired or sleep deprived. I say apparent because since it's quiet, it's hard to know if it's the tinnitus momentarily stopping, or all sound; and the presence of sound may prevent it from happening.
[0] https://www.dxomark.com/apple-macbook-air-15-m2-2023/
https://youtu.be/2yDCox-qKbk?si=eEjtlP97v8UiubX4
it works reliably well
this works for 2-4 mins for me
https://youtu.be/2yDCox-qKbk?si=eEjtlP97v8UiubX4
Well, at least that will get rid of the tinnitus, I thought.
No such luck! I still have tinnitus.
As such I think there may be more to tinnitus than undetected nerve damage.
It isn’t clear cut though: I have some hearing in that ear after all (to the surprise of the doctor). But the tinnitus came back (or never went away) before any hearing returned.
A couple of pieces of advice to people who might be struggling with their tinnitus:
1. You need to learn to cope with it - once you're used to it, it will mostly fade into the background and be manageable. Accepting that it'll never be silent again was very difficult, but that's the only thing hat helped me feel better in the end.
2. Wear ear plugs when it gets too loud! It's too easy to get irreversible damage to your hearing, and that's the only thing you can really do - prevent it.
Curiously, yesterday I woke up at night because the tinnitus had gotten louder again - stupidly, I played drums the other day at a jam session without earplugs. I could punch myself for that one, and see it as (yet another) wakeup call to be more careful.
As OP said though - it's a case of, if you focus on it, it'll weigh you down.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8788157/
I know, I am a heretic for drawing any negative attention to our savior from the deadly pandemic.
If the per-capita rate of onset tinnitus symptoms when getting the vaccine is lower than the rate of onset tinnitus when catching covid, then the vaccine isn’t just not implicated, it’s effectively helpful at reducing tinnitus, as a byproduct of reducing cases and/or severity of covid illness.
Haven't you noticed, after smearing, slandering and discriminating against those who chose not to take it, there is very little interest in following up with comparisons between the two groups? You would have expected scientists to be really interested in comparing the groups considering it was done under Trump's operation warp speed, and used a novel technology never before approved for human use. Instead the vaccine free are ignored. Tells me all I need to know.
Please keep in mind that it doesn’t really matter if a lot of vaccinated people still got covid later. That was expected, because the ‘vaccine’ was not a covid cure. If the spread was slowed and the symptoms were reduced significantly, then the vaccine was successful. There has been lots of science on the unvaccinated, and it found that they died and were hospitalized from covid at much higher rates than vaccinated people. I believe there is plenty of science still happening on the secondary effects of the vaccine, so being unaware of it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. I’m not aware of “harm to many people” who took the vaccine. What harm are you referring to, and how many people were harmed, exactly? Did that harm happen less often or more often than to people who got covid? Just like with tinnitus, you can’t take anecdotes out of context when it happens to someone vaccinated if you don’t compare it to people who weren’t vaccinated.
BTW, while the covid vaccine was an untested vaccine at first (like all vaccines before trials), it did go through trials and it was not untested technology. mRNA therapies had been used in other non-covid trials for a decade, and tested against other infectious diseases for several years before the covid vaccine was developed. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7956899/
Think about it: at this point, we have more data on the effects of the covid vaccine than almost any other vaccine or drug in all of human history. Concerns about it being untested did maybe make sense in March of 2020, but it has now been thoroughly tested and so those concerns don’t make that much sense to hold on to anymore, right?
So I take it you weren’t very interested in talking about tinnitus?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10294225/Its-time...
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/noam-chomsky-says-the-un...
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/16/politics/joe-biden-warnin...
And yes it does matter that people caught covid after as we were promised the opposite. Some people lost everything as a result of the totalitarian lockdowns so we could wait on the savior of a vaccine that turned out to b a complete failure. Some people lost their lives to the useless "vaccine".
No mRNA product had ever been approved for human us despite the decades of research. Why not?
And these "vaccines" caused tinnitus in many people, so it is relevant.
Yes the vaccine might be relevant to tinnitus, and like I said Covid and the flu and catching a cold has also lead to many many people saying those things caused tinnitus. Claiming the vaccine itself is the direct cause of the tinnitus is unjustified and therefore misleading. If the cause is inflammation, then anything that causes inflammation can lead to tinnitus, whether it’s a vaccine or catching a flu or hitting your head. The tinnitus may have nothing to do with the Covid vaccine specifically, it may be nothing more than a byproduct of activating your immune system.
But some people had it worse, so I guess it didn't hurt. And it is probable that vaccines protected me from original strains, which were worse.
If anything, I'm dissapointed that they didn't develop vaccines for new strains soon enough.
I had the ever common thinking it was caused by a visit to the dentist or the antibiotics that were prescribed. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t.
It was also possibly when I walked behind a server rack and the fans were blowing air and the sound from the fans were loud, both into my ears. This could could have caused the damage that caused the tinnitus.
Took about two days to kick in fully. Tinnitus started, then stoped. Then started like it wanted to kick in fully and then stopped. Then started and never left.
99% of the time I never notice it. 1% of the time I do notice.
I also think it has something to do with neck pain and the muscles behind the head and around the neck. If I sleep in the wrong position and get a sore neck, then the tinnitus is crazy loud.
I remember thinking my life would never be the same. I was stuck with this forever. Pretty traumatic event. To anyone else out there, please find comfort that you’ll get used to it. You won’t notice it. It’s not the end of the world. Don’t stress. You’ll be fine.
the obvious exceptions being chronic pain, and the jets' imperative to steal defeat from the jaws of victory.
I found out as well that my headphones plays my own voice back to me so that I dont shout, but was able to turn that off in the settings (Jabra 2), which seems to help.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250886390
Turns out it’s about my neck. I religiously paid attention to my neck position and fixed my posture, and as a result, my tinnitus gradually disappeared.
If I sit in a bad position or sometimes do some weird move, my tinnitus can return but I immediately start a neck massage and fix my posture, and it goes away. Sometimes it can be very severe and lower volume version remains, but it goes away the next day.
I think it happened because I used to move my head forward when sitting in front of a screen. There are chiropractors, who claim to fix tinnitus by fixing the head position and say that it’s associated with some nerve in the neck.
So I decided to work on this and bought a keyboard and a mouse and made myself a rule that I will always use the laptop with a stand or external display so I don't lean over the laptop and sit straight up the way it is ergonomically recommended, pretty much like it says on articles like this: https://healthandbalance.com.au/workstation-desk-posture-erg...
I also begin doing neck exercises, recommended to me by an orthopedist(I got some neck pain for a few days, the orthopedist gave me a couple of movement I should do regularly to increase the straight of my neck muscles, I will leave links to the leaflets of the movements). I also did the push the chin to push your head back movement because although I didn't have clinically severe situation with my head moving forward I noticed that on my old photos my head wasn't leaning forward that much.
After a week or so after I started sitting right, my tinnitus begin to improve rapidly. I even began sleeping the orthopedically correct way and avoiding any stress positions. After some time I tried experimenting stress positions, like using the laptop the way I used to and the tinnitus returned in full force until I fix the posture and do some massages. After a year or two the tinnitus was almost completely gone and stress positions don't immediately bring it back anymore so I can use laptop again but if I'm not careful and overdo it, get carried away and lean into the screen it returns.
the leaflets:
https://imgbb.com/XWnTZVB
https://imgbb.com/r6PBbTK
1) Shows the starting position
2) It says this is exercise for strengthening the muscles. Each of these should be repeated 3 times.
a) Put your hands on your forehead, try to move your head forward as you push back against it with your hands. Do this for 10 seconds and release.
b) The same but this time to back
c) The same but to the sides
d) Hold your head with your hands, one on the forehead and one on the back of your head. Try to rotate your head but stop it with your hands, do this for 10 seconds in both directions.
e) You hold your hands in the shown positions and push against, one hand pushes against the other. The illustration is not very clear but basically you start from the lower position and go higher. After the push, you do the same but this time you hold your hands and stretch.
3) Is for preserving your ability to move. You repeat each one 5 times.
a) You look left by rotating your head, wait 3 seconds the look forward. Then do the same to the other direction.
b) You lean your head until your chin touches your chest and wait 3 seconds, then look straight again but don't push it too much. Then the same but to the back.
c) The same idea but to the sides. Try to lean your head until your ear touches your shoulder but don't push it too much.
d) You rotate your head as much as you can, wait 3 seconds and go back. Then to the other direction. Don't push it too much. Do this 3 times but it's not recommended for old people.
e) Lift your shoulders up and try to get them close to each other at the back. Hold 3 seconds, then go back to the starting position. Do this 10 times.
I also looked around the internet for recommendations but they all converge the idea that you shouldn't be forcing your spine to stay in a curved position beyond the natural curve for too long.
Regardless, I can't escape it either. If I focus on it, I can make myself dissociate from the pain.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35261656/
But when I tried to remember it, I always heard something like a tinnitus sound (albeit quieter) whenever I closed my ears with my hands since my childhood, during which I was never exposed to any loud music or sound.