Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 20 of the Pure Tinnitus and Hearing Podcast. I’m the host, Dr. Ben Thompson of Pure Tinnitus. Today we are here with Pattie and her husband, and Pattie is going to share her story of tinnitus and how she went from very loud, obtrusive, annoying, bothersome tinnitus to a significant reduction in her symptoms. And any time I work with a patient via telehealth who has this kind of success story, I do my best to share it to motivate and inspire others. So, Pattie, I’ll pass it to you. Please tell us a bit about what happened around the time of your tinnitus when it began in April 2020 and bring us into that place initially. Welcome.

Pattie

Thank you, Ben. It’s a pleasure to be here. Yes, I want to help anyone that has tinnitus. And actually my story kind of started at the end of 2019 when I developed a heart problem. And so I was really anxious from all that, and so in April ’20, the tinnitus started, and it was horrible. It was so loud. I was afraid to tell people that I had this noise in my ear because I was afraid that they would think, oh boy, she needs to go to a home or something. I didn’t tell my husband for the longest time or go to the doctor. But anyway, that said, I finally told a really good friend of mine, and she knew all about the tinnitus. And so I was really surprised. So she was happy that I had shared my story with her. So then I shared my story with Terry. It was not only loud noises. It was also some music that would kind of float in and out, and that was quite scary.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

You had musical tinnitus, and you had some other noises like ringings. Is that correct?

Pattie

Yes, really loud ringing.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

And I actually had some notes of those initial times. Eight months later, we actually met, but for those eight months, what was your life? What was your experience of dealing with this tinnitus? How did it affect you?

Pattie

It was really bad. It was really bad. I talked to my husband about it, and then finally I had to go to my doctor. And so he checked my ears and everything, and he said, “Oh, your ears are fine. but do you want to see an audiologist?” I said, “Yes.” And so she came in to Hilo from Honolulu. And then it was quite scary because I was in denial because she told me, she said, “You’re deaf in both ears.” Oh, okay, thank you. See ya. But the tinnitus was so loud. It was night and day all the time. It was really, really scary. And so, yeah, I was living with that for the longest time.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

I have a note that you said your general practitioner, your doctor, they said, “It will always be there. There’s no way it’s going to go away.” Is that correct?

Pattie

Exactly, that’s what he said. And so me being the person I am, I wouldn’t accept what he said. So you can ask my husband. I was on my iPad practically day and night until I found a, would find a solution. So I found a couple of solutions, but then I met Ben, and Ben was my really big hope for my tinnitus.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Before we get too deep into that, so that was eight months after you’ve had tinnitus.

Pattie

Yeah.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

In those eight months, did your volume change? Did it stay the same? Was it constant?

Pattie

It was constant thing, and I was crying. Or I would come out, and I’d say to Terry, “Well, today we have got a siren going off in one ear, and something else going off in the other ear.” I mean, it stopped my whole life. It did. Everything stopped. And I wanted to find a good solution for this, and for eight months, it was bad.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

When you got the hearing test, and they said, “You’re deaf,” well, I reviewed your hearing test. It didn’t show that you have complete hearing loss because you’re actually able to hear, but it did show that you had some hearing loss in the high pitch tones, correct?

Pattie

Yes, and it happened to be my right ear, which is really the worst. Now, my left ear, I could hear. I could hear. And so I talked to Ben about all this. I sent him my hearing test. He went over it, and he confirmed pretty much what the audiologist here in Hilo said. But I didn’t want to hear that hearing aid word. But Ben was, he was so good about it. He just kind of gently nudged me a little bit toward the hearing aid idea. And so finally I went to an audiologist here in town who is also really pretty good, and he didn’t push me.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

So you and I started the tinnitus retraining, which is the individual education, the individual counseling.

Pattie

Yes.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

And part of that was recommending, hey, you have a hearing loss, and you have tinnitus. Let’s follow the protocol. Let’s get hearing aids that also have sound therapy inside of them.

Pattie

Think so.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

So we did that, and we also were working on the holistic part of this. So you were sharing that the hearing aids, did they help immediately, or did it take time to adjust to them? What did you notice in that process?

Pattie

They helped immediately. I love my hearing aids. I do because they really helped me so much to get my life back together. And I’m not afraid of them anymore. But, yes, they helped immediately. If anyone out there has partial hearing loss, and you need to have hearing aids, do it. They’re expensive, but do it because now I can hear all kinds of sounds, and I wear them all the time.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

So around winter, around December or so of 2020, now about eight months after you develop the tinnitus, you started the tinnitus retraining, hearing aids plus sound therapy plus individual professional counseling together. And also you had a holistic part of this. You were taking a holistic approach as well. So can you talk to us about what you did because now your tinnitus, as you told us, or as you will explain more, is essentially nothing even with the hearing aids off, and that’s quite incredible. So I just want you to work us through, what did you do for the last six months in terms of the holistic part of this?

Pattie

What I did was I never walked into a quiet room. I always had some sort of music going. I like Zen, water, that kind of thing. So even in the kitchen, I have like a little thing that you can turn on. And bedroom, I always had music going. Everywhere I went, even if I didn’t have my hearing aids in, the music was there so it could fill my brain with something else other than the tinnitus noise. And that’s what really, it turned my life around because I’d think, yeah right. This doesn’t work, but it works. And to this day, my tinnitus gotten so much better that I don’t even notice it anymore. And if I do notice it, I stop, regroup, take deep breaths, and do my good breathing. And it’ll pass. It’ll pass. But now it’s quiet.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

And what was the volume level consistently for your tinnitus before you started the retraining, and then what is it now six months after you did?

Pattie

Before, it was so loud. It was so loud that I couldn’t sleep. No, I couldn’t sleep at night. My poor husband, I was up to two, three o’clock in the morning, walking the floors, but he was so good to help me work through this part of my tinnitus. And now it’s a one. It’s a one. it’s a zero, actually, even without my hearing aids in.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

And that’s very hard for some people to believe almost because we think, oh, the hearing aid helps with my tinnitus, but then when I take the hearing aids off, it’s back to what it was. But from what you’re telling us, that’s not what you’re experiencing at all.

Pattie

No, not at all. If you still do the retraining, and I do even without my hearing aids, I still have some sort of noise going whatever room I’m in. The televisions might be going, or the radio might be going, or there’s other noise. Even when I’m outside, I’m experiencing new sounds, new noise.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

You took the sound therapy part of this very seriously.

Pattie

Yes, I did, and I still do. I still do.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

And now, if you have no sound therapy, if you’re in a quiet room, what do you hear in your ears or in your head?

Pattie

Nothing. It’s quiet.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

And I asked you earlier, I asked you,

Pattie

Quiet.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

I asked you, Pattie, if you told this story eight months ago, what would you think if you were the person viewing your story instead of the one telling it?

Pattie

I think they would say yeah, right. How could that happen so quickly? Yeah, well, she must, he must be paying her to say these things. And he’s not, and I’m not an actress. I’m a real person. And it really happened. If you just follow the protocol and do the sound therapy, and if you need hearing aids, get them and keep doing the sound therapy. And it’s changed my life back, you know?

Ben Thompson, AuD.

So happy to hear that. So happy to hear that, and we can celebrate that. And did you also practice meditation and things like that, taking care of your health other than your ears and the sound?

Pattie

You know, during the first stages of the tinnitus, it was hard for me to meditate at first because I couldn’t bring my thoughts together because it was so loud. But now, and I found you can meditate anywhere. You don’t have to be in a special place or anything. So, yes, I do deep breathing, and I do meditate when I’m outside or when I’m sitting quietly. So, yes, deep breathing and meditation was a big part of my life.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

And I have a quote that you shared with me the last time we spoke. And you said, “Even though I was hesitant,” that me, Dr. Ben, was gently pushing you forward through the protocol and making sure you were doing it. So did you feel some hesitation and some resistance at the beginning of not being sure if it would work for you and things like that?

Pattie

Yes, of course. Just like anyone, you’re not sure. And you’re thinking the hearing aids, you think about, okay, maybe your aunt who had these old-type hearing aids where they were loud all the time or ringing or something. But these hearing aids that I have are just, they’re awesome. And I can turn on a noise in my hearing aids if the tinnitus gets loud, but I don’t have to use it. I don’t have to use it at all, and, yeah, it’s pretty awesome. But, yes, I was really hesitant. But Dr. Ben was so good about just gently pushing me and not really saying this is what you got to do. And then I talked to my audiologist here, and he did another hearing test and confirmed everything. And there, again, he didn’t push, he didn’t push.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

So we had a team approach, and it worked. It did work.

Pattie

It did.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

And how about you and your husband now, of course, being in relationship and going through loud tinnitus? It really affects relationships. I see that every day with the clients that I help. And do you want to comment, either of you, on any of your relationship or how the tinnitus was probably a central theme in your household for a while?

Pattie

Well, I think once Terry understood about the tinnitus and everything, he really became concerned. And he helped me through it. He was there every step of the way with me. He was my big support. If I didn’t have that kind of support, it would be hard to get through the tinnitus. So yeah, he was my big support in helping me. He understood. He was very patient. So, don’t make me cry.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

I will not make you cry. Terry, how you doing back there?

Terry

I’m doing fine. She’s always been able to hear me. So I always thought, why do you need hearing aids? She’s always been able to hear me every time I talk, so I kind of said, “Well, you have to do what you have to do.” I never stood in her way. I said, “Just do whatever you have to do to get better.” There wasn’t much I could do outside of,

Pattie

Support.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

And what have you noticed, Terry? What have you noticed in terms of joy, happiness, her energy levels? Of course, living together, you’re very on the pulse of that. So what have you noticed over the last eight months?

Terry

Every day I ask her, “Well, is it a one or a 10 day?” Last week, it’s always been number one, which is very good. So things right now are good.

Pattie

Yep, it’s been a number one. That’s what you need to strive for, is that number one to where the tinnitus is, eh, you know, I don’t think about it, really. If I have a little stress, it might try to come in, but then I do my deep breathing, and it’s gone. So, that’s a big relief.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

And how long has it consistently been like that for you? Obviously, there’s a transition. There’s a progression to it, but how long have you been living in this space of one out of 10 days?

Pattie

Let me see. Just actually, what, about three weeks? No, it’s been longer, one out of 10 days. It’s been couple of months, a month, couple of months that I’ve been.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

And moving forward, just like you said, there may be some periods of stress or a temporary change in the tinnitus, but there are tools, there are resources. It’s not a permanent change. So I’m so happy to share your story. And, again, for anyone who’s listening or watching, the reason we’re doing this, the reason Pattie, Terry, and myself are doing this is to hopefully help the individual or the family of someone who is where Pattie was maybe eight months ago. And do you have any messages for that person who’s listening or watching, Pattie, with the caveat that not everyone has your exact history. So we can’t absolutely say that if someone follows exactly what you did, that it would work for them. But we try to follow the protocols that work for most people. Do you have anything to share to help others?

Pattie

Get a hold of some good resources about tinnitus because there’s some not-so-good and good. So follow what you can. Listen if you’ve gone to see an audiologist, listen to what he has to say. Just choose your own path and go for it and do the best you can. And you’ll work through it. You’ll work through it.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Yeah, thank you so much, Pattie and Terry, and this has been episode 20 of the Pure Tinnitus and Hearing Podcast. We are sharing stories. We’re sharing professional interviews. This specific conversation is really important and dear to my heart because, to me, there’s nothing more valuable than helping someone out of stress, insomnia, and suffering into a place of peace. And, Pattie, I’ll leave the final words for you guys, and then we’ll sign off. Please take it away.

Terry

Back to golf, US Open, yay!

Pattie

Just listen, just listen to what good people have to say about tinnitus. And like I said before, get yourself some good things to follow. It’s got to go through certain, you need to just take it one day at a time, one day at a time, and it’ll work. It’ll work for you. Just get some good information. Try to follow certain kinds of protocol, and it’ll happen. It happened to me. It’ll happen. And I was skeptical, but just follow your heart on what you need to do. Get some good people behind you and go for it, and it’ll be great.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Thank you so much, Pattie. All right, everyone, talk to you soon.

The post Tinnitus Success Story – Pattie – #20 appeared first on Pure Tinnitus.

Hello and welcome. This is episode number 19 with the Pure Tinnitus & Hearing Podcast. My name is Dr. Thompson. Today’s special guest is David Eagleman, Ph.D., neuroscientist, author, technologist, and entrepreneur. Dr. Eagleman’s research encompasses brain plasticity, sensory substitution, time perception. And we’re here today to talk about his work with the company called Neosensory. They’ve recently released a product, a technology called the Neosensory Duo, which is a wristband. And we’re here today to meet with Dr. Eagleman and learn more about how the Neosensory Duo could potentially help people with their tinnitus. Dr. Eagleman welcome. And let’s start with learning a little bit about your history with the company Neosensory, and how your company got involved with tinnitus.

David Eagleman, PhD.

Yeah, great. So I’ve run research labs since I was a young man and I got really interested in this issue of sensory substitution, which is how can you feed information into the brain via unusual pathways. And so one of the things that I got interested in my lab is could we address deafness where, so, you know, there are about 220 reasons why somebody might go deaf, could we push auditory information into the brain via another channel. And so what we came up with at the time was a vest with vibratory motors all over it. And it would capture sound and turn sound into patterns of vibration on the skin and people who were deaf could come to hear the word that way, like actually hear the word, which sounds crazy of course, but it’s because the ear is just transferring air compression waves in despite that go off to the auditory cortex, we were able to just get spikes to the brain via another channel. So we built this device which is called the Neosensory Buzz when we reduced the vest down to the wristband and this has vibratory motors all along here. Okay, so that’s how the company started. I spun that off from my lab about six years ago now.

But more recently, what happened is we were just studying the literature and looking at what was going on. And we saw that there were two different groups who were addressing tinnitus in particular. One was a Susan Shore’s group from University of Michigan. And one was Conlin at all this group from Ireland that was addressing these in scientific papers. And what they showed is that candidates could be driven down the aversiveness of tinnitus could be driven down by what’s called bimodal stimulation, which is having sounds played and simultaneously having touch going to the body. Now, both groups used shocks on the tongue and they used an electro-tactile grid on the tongue. And what they found in these published papers was that the combination of these obviously it’s called bimodal ’cause it’s two modes it’s hearing and it’s touch. They found that it drove the aversiveness of tinnitus down. And so I was really intrigued by these studies and I thought, wow, I wonder why they use the tongue. And it turns out the reason they did that is because Susan Shore’s lab was studying a very particular nucleus called the dorsal cochlear nucleus, which is involved in that’s the first place where auditory information meets, touch some of sensory information from the head and neck. And that’s why they use the tongue because they wanted head and neck stimulation to meet the thing. Now why the dorsal cochlear nucleus? It’s because that happens to be what they were studying separately in animals. They happen to dunk their electrodes in the DCN. And so they were doing studies to see if they could match it up. But the thing that struck me as almost all the time in neuroscience, whenever somebody says, hey, I think this is the spot in the brain where something is happening. It’s usually not the case. It’s usually just because that happens to be where they’re, it’s the drunk looking for the keys under the streetlight. So anyway, I thought let’s try this. Let’s try and see if bimodal stimulation with stimulation on the skin from the wrist does the same thing. And so we’ve been studying that for a while now and we get exactly the same results that Susan Chore’s lab did and the Irish Group did. The Irish Group has spun off a company called Linea, which does sound plus electro-tactile shock on the tongue. So that’s how we got here.

So we tried this just to see if this bi-modal stimulation would work if it’s on the skin, it works just fine. I’ll tell you my interpretation of this. I mean, there’s detailed interpretations, but the simplest way to look at this is that there’s brain plasticity, your brain is constantly changing and reconfiguring, and so on. And I think what’s going on here might be as simple as this is teaching the brain the difference between external and internal sounds. So when you are hearing a sound and feeling verification of that sound on your skin, your brain says, oh, okay, got it. There’s a sound in the outside world and I can tell that’s an external sound because I’m hearing it and I’m feeling it. In contrast when there’s tinnitus happening. You’re not feeling anything here. And so your brain says, oh, I get it. That’s an internal sound, that’s different. And so what happens is, you start seeing the results from that. And with the Linea Group, the Irish Group, they do their thing usually for 10 to 12 weeks, we’ve done studies where we do this for eight weeks and we find about the biggest result. Although we found it in a few people that it keeps going a little bit to 12 weeks, but yeah, so it’s not an instant thing. It takes a little bit for your brain to reorganize to drive that down. And by the way, when I’m talking about driving it down, I want to specify two things which is, it’s not a cure for tinnitus, but it drives down the aversiveness as measured by the tinnitus functional index, the TFI, which probably many listeners are familiar with, asked a series of questions about how it’s affected their lives, how they feel about it, this sort of thing and those scores, the scores go down a clinically significant amount. So on the TFI, it’s considered clinically significant, a few drop by 13 points. And most of our subjects have that or bigger.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Okay, well, we’re going to get into that science in a little bit, really excited about that. And Dr. Eagleman thank you so much. We’re so glad you’re here because anytime a neuroscientists like yourself and a research group chooses to research tinnitus more, we know that we’re getting closer to understanding the complexity of this is much more than just an ear phenomenon here. So other systems in the brain that are very much involved in this sustained activation of tinnitus, and you’re an author, you’ve written eight books, you are a brain lover, you’re fixated on the brain. You’ve done great work with that. Your latest book is called “Live Wired.” You talked a bit there about showing the brain that tinnitus is an internal signal. And having that validation through that bi-modal stimulation. Tell us the difference between someone who can hear what you’re saying, understand it cognitively versus the brain being shown it and knowing it at a subconscious level and how there’s differences between those two levels of understanding and one might affect the actual level of tinnitus whereas the other might not necessarily.

David Eagleman, PhD.

Yeah, I mean, almost everything that brain does happens at an unconscious level. So what we are conscious of is just the tiniest little bit, the conscious mind is like the broom closet in the mansion of the brain. So this happens all the time. I mean, if I were to tell you as a kid, okay, here’s how you ride a bicycle, you bounced a tour. So you, you know, I can tell you all that, but you need to actually do it and train your brain unconsciously on that. Likewise, if I say to you, you know, hey, don’t worry about the tinnitus. It’s just an internal sound. It’s not actually a real sound in the world that the cognitive influence on that is essentially zero. You need to actually train the brain to understand the difference between external and internal sounds yeah.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

That’s really huge, that’s really huge. So overall, how does the wristband work? If you, if someone asks you really quickly, how does this wristband work? What is your response?

David Eagleman, PhD.

Yeah, so capture sound and it translates that sound into a spectrum of frequencies on the wrist. If I play a high sound beep, it’s shown up over here. If I play this and it looks on boom, it comes out over here. The way this works for people who have hearing loss is that you’re capturing the whole world and doing this the way we’re doing this with tinnitus. It’s the same hardware exactly but what we’re doing tinnitus is we play a series of tones. We’ve been trying all kinds of experiments about, so our, I should say our first set of experiments, it’s just tones going up and down and up and down. And the band is responding to these, but we’re doing other things now where we’re playing unpredicted tones with different durations, all of it’s unpredictable. This is just a minor tweak because the brain responds best to things that doesn’t quite predict. So that’s one of the things we’re offering now, but what a lot of a lot of people do now is they just wear the surround while they’re walking around during the day.

So in other words, they play the tones, which is the training. And what we found in our experiments is that 10 minutes a day is sufficient. So, you know, you just do something quiet. You read a book, you surf your phone on, whatever. But for 10 minutes, the brain is really getting these tones. But what a lot of people do is they then wear it around outside of that also, so that they’re picking up on the sounds of the world. So in the microwave beeps or the door shuts or whatever, they’re just hearing sound and getting verification of it. And that seems to be great as well.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

That’s fantastic. And of course, whenever there’s a new technology in the tennis world, we are optimistic and simultaneously patient trying to get as much data and objective information on this as we can before making any big promises. As you’ve said, this is not intended to cure tinnitus. None of the bimodal stimulation devices are. I want to ask you a user question. I asked the Pure Tinnitus community that we are having this interview, and there was a user question about, would it be more beneficial to use the Neosensory Duo wristband for longer than 10 minutes a day? And why did your research group decide to go with 10 minutes as a standard daily practice with it?

David Eagleman, PhD.

Yes, so we ended up doing, you know, so as I said, we looking at the papers of what had come before we realized that it doesn’t have to be that long. And by the way, 10 minutes of sitting and listening to tones is a long time and enough. If you imagine spending 10 minutes, trying to learn how to ride a bike every day, you get pretty far that way. So that’s what we ended up running for the studies. And what we found is that, that work that drove the diversity of tinnitus down as measured by the tinnitus functional index. And so that’s why we did it.

Now a lot of people have written us to say, hey, I’m using it for longer. I’m using it for half an hour a day. I’m using multiple sessions a day and that’s great. We don’t actually know at the moment, whether there’s a significant difference there, whether that makes it better or not, but it certainly doesn’t hurt. So we are telling people great, as long as you did at least 10 minutes, that’s what you need. And if you use it for longer, that’s great. I think as we get more data in over the, you know, over the coming years, we’ll start seeing whether the people who wear it for a lot longer, have a really different clinically different out, significantly different outcome.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Thank you so much. And I want to bring this into another important point here is that a lot of tinnitus sufferers or people who are really suffering with tinnitus are in a state of high anxiety and insomnia. And with your knowledge of the brain and how these systems work with each other. First of all, it’s important to know that people have reduced their tinnitus without these technologies we’re talking about, although they are the newest most promising research developments, other people have reduced their tinnitus without them because being a tinnitus telehealth specialist myself, people are often asking me in a very anxious state. Do I need to do this right now? Am I missing out? And I just wanted you to comment from your perspective knowledge of the brain, about how anxiety, insomnia, stress might influence tinnitus and how the Neosensory Duo or any treatment product technology plays a role in that.

David Eagleman, PhD.

Yeah. It seems a big part of the problem with tinnitus of course, is the emotional reaction to the sound. And so, just as an example, what we were mentioning before about if the brain understands it as an internal sound, that it doesn’t need to pay attention to, that makes a big difference. But I think there are probably lots of different angles on reducing stress. And so obviously when people meditate, when they get better sleep, when they stop drinking, which disrupts her sleep. So there’s all kinds of ways of reducing stress, such that when people hear the sound, they don’t have to feel anxious about it. So what we of course are recommending to people is to try all of this in other words. So just as an example, for people who pick up the Neosensory Duo, we tell them terrific, do this. And by the way, here are other tips on reducing stress in your life as well. My, I mean, I think we probably share the suspicion that there’s the best way to do this is to hit all those fronts to make sure you’re getting good sleep, good diet, reducing stress in your life.

By the way, I noticed something amazing. I didn’t have a chance to tell you about this has been but so we’ve been measuring the tinnitus functional index on a whole bunch of participants going through this and back in, I think it was March if I’m remembering this correctly when we changed daylight savings time and suddenly everyone lost an hour of sleep. Everyone’s tinnitus bumped up that week, just be, but anyway, it was a real illustration to me of how just a little something like everybody losing an hour of sleep, really drove it up just temporarily. So anyway, it’s so clearly related to all kinds of issues about how your body is doing that, that day or that week.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Yeah, we call it tinnitus, the health amateur, or the barometric pressure reader of the body. And the most common reason someone has a sudden onset in this is to studied in 1995 by the Hazel Group within this et cetera. The two most common factors associated with the emergence of sudden onset bothersome tinnitus were stressors around work or retirement or money or interpersonal relationships or anxiety or stress around that. So those are not auditory, only fourth on the list was acoustic trauma. So it shows us that yes, it’s related to the ear, but usually, the driver for sudden onset loud tinnitus is not the auditory pathway individually. So really fascinating stuff and I want to transition into some nitty-gritty scientific questions. It won’t be textbook, boring, scientific questions. These will be fun, exciting questions that people do like to learn about because it gives them more knowledge of what’s happening with their tinnitus. And if you’re a professional listening or watching, this will help you counsel patients because you’re going to get a lot of questions about the neosensory duo and other bimodal stimulation devices in the next few years I believe.

So question number one, what regions of the brain need to change for tinnitus to reduce in loudness, which can happen. And I’ve seen it that does happen. What needs to change in the brain for tinnitus to reduce in perceived loudness or perceived annoyance.

David Eagleman, PhD.

Yeah, these are terrific questions. And we don’t actually know the answer to, we as a community writ large don’t know the answer. What seems to be the case is that the limbic system, which is this deep emotional center, seems to be very involved in what happens with one’s reaction to tinnitus. So for most people with tinnitus, it ends up being really stressful and anxiety producing. And what the general story seems to be with any of the approaches, whether it’s bimodal stimulation or meditation or better sleep or whatever is unhooking it from the limbic system a bit. So that it doesn’t feel so stressful. And this is in part what the TFI is measuring. It’s not simply the loudness of it, but the aversiveness of it. So that seems to be a big part. The general story whenever we talk about what part of the brain is, there’s almost never a single spot you can point to. And actually, this is why I was skeptical when I saw this report about, oh, we think the dorsal cochlear nucleus might be a spot that’s really the key spot because it involves the whole forest of the brain. Things are changing all over the place. But anyway, that, you know, I wish we knew more in 2021, but that seems to be the main thing is unhooking the stressfulness of the sound from the limbic system. And again, that’s why we think the bimodal stimulation works is it’s just teaching. Okay, that’s an internal sound. I don’t need to attend to it. I don’t need to think about it because it’s not something real.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Yeah, and I believe that’s called the global brain system right. So what other experiences have you had? What other health conditions might have a similar effect where there’s the center of a certain sense in the brain, but then it’s impacted by so many other regions.

David Eagleman, PhD.

I mean, essentially everything we look at. So look at something like blindness. So you would think okay, blindness has something to do with the eyes, but of course there’s cortical blindness too. And what’s, you know, for anyone who’s studied neuroscience on this you can get damaged, all kinds of parts of the visual cortex and you end up with different flavors of what it even means to be blind. You can lose color perception, you can lose the ability to name, you know, something you can say, oh yeah, I get it. It’s got a long handle on a thing, but you can’t name it as a hammer, or you can lose the ability to look at the hammer and draw it. You’re unable to draw it now, but you know perfectly well what it is and say, oh, that’s a hammer, but I can’t draw. There are a million ways, I would say the main lesson of neuroscience, maybe over the last 150 years has been that what we think of is like, oh yeah, I’m just seeing, or I’m hearing or whatever it’s actually made up of all these sub pieces and parts and different lesions, different areas of damage to the brain are what have illustrated that to us.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

We’re glad we have you and your team working on this because this is way over my head for that in-depth scientific analysis, testing the actual comparisons and their experiments, and we’re really fascinated. So thank you for choosing to be involved in the hearing and tinnitus communities. The question we had touched on earlier of the different research groups that have looked at bimodal stimulation and some things I wanted to ask you on. So we have the vagus nerve, we have the trigeminal nerve, which of those are coming through the tongue, which of those might be coming through the neck. And how does that relate to the brain with bimodal stimulation compared to neosensory’s approach?

David Eagleman, PhD.

Here’s the general story. So you’ve got some Madison station, which is sensation from the body like touch. Of course it involves pressure and itch and temperature and other things too. But you’ve got this coming from the whole body going into the brain. And the key is that it all ends up going to the somatic sensory cortex, which is where essentially you’d wear headphones, where you’re wearing headphones. That’s this amount of sensory cortex. And so it all gets there. But this is the little Subtle point I mentioned before, which is that touch from the head and the neck actually goes and hits the stores of cochlear nucleus also. And that’s why this group that was stunning this thought, maybe that was the key thing. And so, like I said, I didn’t know if that was the key thing. I was maybe a little suspicious that it would be a single spot. So that’s why we tried it. But that’s how we found that this works just as well. But the point is, this goes up into the brain, it hits the sensory cortex, but here’s, I would say the overarching thing that is the most important thing about the brain, which is that everything connects to everything else. And so even though we tend to think about, okay, here’s vision, here’s hearing, there’s touch, blah, blah. In fact, the brain is fundamentally multi-sensory and you happen to have these old windows where different types of information get in, you know, photons or compression waves or pressure. But as soon as it’s past the primary sensory, cortices, everything is about, okay, how are these things fitting together? And that’s how we actually make our model of the world is as a multi-sensory thing. Yeah, which is why, if someone gives you a gift you pick it up, you shake it, you look at it, you listen to it. I mean, everything that we examine in the world is multisensory so I hope that yeah.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Thank you so much. And then these different research groups looking at the neck or the tongue, as I know, doing some evoked potential work for testing in audiology, which means electrodes on the skin to measure brain response, et cetera. There’s different impedance or resistance of the electrical signal. So tell us if that’s a factor here between the wrist, the neck, the tongue, how that all works.

David Eagleman, PhD.

Great question. It’s not because what we’re doing here is not an electrical signal, it’s just pressure. So imagine the buzzer on your cell phone buzzing here. And so what we have is just touched directly on the skin and then that gets carried by nerves up into the spinal cord and up into the brain. So in this case electrical impedance doesn’t have anything to do with it. It’s just like, yeah. Like a fly landed on you or something like that. It’s just you’ve got these nerves that carry the signals into your brain.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Very good, thank you. And where does the two months come from between your research group and others in bimodal stimulation? People ask me, this, is this a permanent thing? And I tell them well, tinnitus retraining therapy is typically about a year of retraining. So where did the two months come from?

David Eagleman, PhD.

So I’ll tell you what we did is we studied this for two months and I mentioned this briefly before, but I’ll just repeat this ’cause it’s sort of an important week. What we found is that it’s not an instant thing, just like buy credit. And what we found is that around eight weeks is when it seemed to flatten out. So we said, all right, two months seems to be the thing when we looked at all the subjects together, that seemed to be sufficient. And we also know that we’re facing, how do I put this? People who want in a syrupy, they don’t want to do something forever for six months, for a year or something like that. And so we ended up on two months as this period that seems to be a really good compromise between these two things.

Now, the way we structure this as is as a rental program. So people rent the thing for two months and then they return it. But some people, I mean, a lot of people now have said that they really are getting benefit out of this and they want to keep it for longer for one of two reasons, either they want to keep it going to 12 weeks, 16 weeks, or they just want to have it in their drawer in case they need it again. So I would say two months is the period that we chose. That seems like, okay, that’s about the right period of time. That’s one can use it as I mentioned though, we did find in some of our studies just recently, we’ve been running people longer and some people not everyone have a little bit of a dip again in the third month. So the way we set up the program is that you can run it for a few months. You can run it for three months. You can run it for four months. If you ran it for four months then you just keep it forever. So that’s the way we’ve set it up to try out like that.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Yeah, thank you. And I have patients asking me, should I use the neosensory duo and in my initial responses, okay, let’s take a step back. What are the fundamentals for tinnitus retraining, mental health, sleep, using sound therapy for most hours of the day. And this particularly applies to someone who’s had a more recent onset than it is, or someone who’s been having loud tinnitus for a few years or a few months, I counsel them and say, let’s focus on the fundamentals. Let’s make sure those are solid and then consider supplemental approaches. And at this time bimodal stimulation, in my opinion, is supplemental to a foundational approach. And I also would include things like meditation, mental health, self-care as supplemental. And I’m wondering how your group counsels people who call in about the product.

David Eagleman, PhD.

Yeah, it’s exactly the same. And actually one of the things that we set up is when people, when people, I mean, not that many people come to us for counseling before, but once people have it, we send a series of emails out weekly. And this is one of the main things that we going to make sure we counsel is about all the other things, just to make sure all of those are in line in terms of stress and drinking and diet and sleep and stuff like that. Yeah, and I agree with you, it’s all, you know, the truth is it’s a little, it’s a little hard to know for anybody’s particular case where the problem is, and bimodal simulation feels to me like, you know, like physically you’re changing something in the brain. So it feels like a slightly different category than just making sure that sleep and diet and stress are down. Which is equally as important. But I don’t, yeah. I don’t know which to say is the foundation in which I just think both parts are super important.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

It’s in development, it’s definitely in development. It’s definitely in development. And I see that as the research becomes more clear and we’re patient, right? Anxiety and tinnitus and we want to get our life better as soon as possible. But we don’t want to force something and we have to be patient because research takes time right?

David Eagleman, PhD.

Yeah, yeah, exactly right.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Yeah. Question for you is, as a scientist, have you had research hypothesis that your lab has tested, but they’ve failed?

David Eagleman, PhD.

I mean all the time, I mean, yes.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

When you know, when do you know that a hypothesis isn’t working.

David Eagleman, PhD.

Oh, as soon as the data tells you? So just as an example with bimodal stimulation, I, you know, I, we tried it on the wrist and not having any idea if you need to have head and neck stem or whether wrists would work. So we tried it and what we found is that on average 87% of people had this great result with it. So then we felt like, oh, that’s great. But I was completely prepared slash even possibly expecting that it wouldn’t work on the wrist, but yeah, I think anybody scientific career is defined by failure. All, I mean, you know, just all the time. One is when it’s trying things that fail. And this is really the important part of science probably life too. It’s just trying a million experiments and seeing what works that’s how anything moves forward.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it makes sense that your lab would test this and see something before having larger experiments and then releasing a product to the public. So at what point do you have a large enough sample size to have the validity or have a high confidence that you can recommend this to a population level? That’s the golden question that I as an audiologist I’m sort of waiting for yeah.

David Eagleman, PhD.

Yeah, exactly. So we tested it on a group of, I think we’ve got 64 people and what we found is a very clear result. But the interesting part is the result we found was exactly the same size and shape as what Linea had found and Susan Shore had found. So it ended up becoming part of a larger picture and the near the paper that they published in science translational medicine had 326 people in it. And so what happened is we then started releasing this very slowly for people to try this. And we keep very careful track for people who want to share, not all customers want to share, but for those who do, you know, we do a lot of customer discovery interviews where we call people, we talk to them about it, we see what’s going on, how it’s going. And so what we have now is a much larger pool of people, all of whom have had, you know, sorry, not all of whom about 87% of whom have had really good results. And by the way, I just want to mention, maybe you’re going to ask this anyway, but you might ask, okay, why 87% who’s the other 13%? And the answer is, we don’t know yet. We don’t know why not everyone responds. So the way we took care of this just as a company, the way we took care of this is we have this 30 day money back guarantee. So this is just, this was just a way to solve this for us, where what we found is by four weeks people are clearly seeing, they’re clearly heading down the slope if they’re going to have help. And so we hope that in a year, like, you know, Ben we’ll talk in six months or a year from now, we have lots of data. And my hope, my dream is that we’ll be able to say like, oh, look, if you have an acoustic neuroma, this won’t work for you but if you have this this will work for you, whatever, but we don’t know what the answer is yet right now. And so that’s why we just wanted to make sure that anybody who wasn’t finding any result, that they were satisfied with, they just get their money back no questions asked.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

I studied with Dr. Jastreboff and in our field, he’s a leading tinnitus scientist and has been for a number of decades. And one thing that he, when I asked him about how do I evaluate new technologies and their response was make sure that we’re testing these outcomes six months after starting, because there can be a strong sort of return in a period of two or three months. So as my individual self and professional, I’m saying, okay, before I highly, highly endorsed a new technology, I want to see the longterm effect. And what have you seen in terms of six months, 12 months between the wristband, which I know is relatively new versus the other research groups?

David Eagleman, PhD.

Yeah, great. So what in the near published, I think it was last year now they published a 12 months out study with their 326 adults. And they found that 12 months later the effect held from bimodal stimulation. So we are of course tracking it now, if people who experimental subjects, who did the bimodal stimulation with a wristband and then stopped, and then we’ve been tracking them out, we’re only about three months out currently. And so far it holds, but I mean, obviously where we want to get is six, 12 months out. So ask me again in three months, but it looks very promising right now. And the thing is, again, the Linea Study found 12 months out that the effect health.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

I have two older brothers and it feels like your company has some different older siblings who have been researching this and setting the framework a bit so that if yours is in line earlier, we can say, well, it’s likely going to follow theirs but we’re not claiming that yet.

David Eagleman, PhD.

That’s exactly right, that’s exactly right. And you know, we’ve also found that, so we’ve also run a control group with just the tones, without the wristband. In fact, we don’t even tell people that we’re a company called neosensors, so they can’t look us up on the web or anything. I’ve run people with tones and what we found is that some of those controlled subjects seem to have a good results too. And this is something that I think is not surprising in the sense that some people have. So what we’re doing is measuring the, you know, how long that lasts and I’ll be able to tell you more data as the time goes along. But our expectation of course is that what we’re seeing is that it really lasts with the wristband. And the presumption is that this is not going to last with the control group. In this for a couple of reasons. One is that Susan Shore, for example, had a control group and showed a very big difference between the bimodal stimulation and the control.

And the other thing is that, I mean, this is not really a scientific argument, but just, I would be really surprising to me if just tones alone worked well because that would have been something that was in place and it had been long ago discovered. So, so this is why we’re. Yeah, but we’re just being really careful about the control thing. One of the things that is really interesting about the Linea Study, is that they didn’t have a control group. So they did the bimodal stimulation three different ways and found great results. And they found that it lasted a year, but what would have made it a perfect paper is if they had a control group that just did audio only. So that’s what we’re making sure we’re implementing that.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

I’m glad you’re incorporating that audio only part of this, because in my understanding, it’s hard to have a control when there’s obvious, conscious perception of stimulation right?

David Eagleman, PhD.

Yeah, exactly. So what we’re doing is we online recruited control subjects and we don’t tell them that we’re Neosensory or anything, and they just go online and listen to these tones, booboo, booboo, going up every day. They do that for 10 minutes a day. And yeah, that’s how we’re doing the audio only control.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Well, we’re wrapping up here. I want to give you some time to address to the tinnitus community here at pure tinnitus. I’ve developed this purpose to really help people who are trying to put all these pieces together. There’s so much information online and there’s a lot of misinformation. Your company has jumped on the scene in the past number of months and year or so. And I want you to speak to the tinnitus community about what might be important for them in the next three to six months, from your knowledge of the brain of the holistic side of this, of the technology side of this, please have the floor.

David Eagleman, PhD.

Well, here’s what I’d say. You know, the thing about bimodal stimulation, one of the great advantages of it is it’s really simple. And it seems to work really well, both from our results, in the Linea results and Susan Shores results. And on top of that, we have this 30-day money back guarantee. And I should also mention the thing about linea, who published this big study. You know, they’re not in the United States yet. And so what we have found, I’m just giving from feedback from the community. We’ve found is this is super useful and helpful for people to be able to rent this inexpensively it’s, I can’t remember exactly, but I think this is, you know, it’s some small fraction of the price of the linea thing. And as I understand it, if I’m correct about this with linea, you have to do this in an audiologist’s office. So you go in every day and you put it on the headphones, you put this electric tactile grid on your tongue.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Not necessarily, not necessarily in an office, but with, with headphones over your ears.

David Eagleman, PhD.

Oh, okay. But do they actually send you the equipment or you do it?

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Yeah, you go home with the equipment as long as I know.

David Eagleman, PhD.

Great, terrific. So, okay, so again, it’s not in the United States, so that’s obviously I’m lacking some detail on it. But so what we found is this is really, this is something that a lot of people have responded very well to us putting out as a product. And what we’re doing now is, you know, as I mentioned, we’re doing all these things with different types of tones and being able to figure out exactly your own frequency and the loudness and so on and dance around that sort of combining notch therapy and the bimodal stimulation. We’re also doing this now. This is about to be released where some people of course have very high pitched tone. And so we’re doing it now where it’s via Bluetooth, where you’re the app that, you know, we have a freemium century app on the phone. And instead of just playing tones that the wristband can hear, you can play very high tones that you’re listening to on headphones and via Bluetooth it’s stimulating the wristbands so that if you happen to have high frequency, anyway, all this is to say, we’re doing lots and lots of things to make this a better and better experience. And I’m really jazzed that the truth is that we developed this wristband for a different purpose it’s for hearing loss, completely separate purpose, but it happens to work really well for this. And so this has been a direction that we’ve gone in and we’ve already been getting so much feedback from people of different sorts. So I mean, part of it is, you know, okay, it was real loud diversive now it’s not, some people say it went from a high-pitched whine to like more of a hiss. Everyone is reporting different sorts of things. And one of the things that we’re going to be doing, we’re already been doing it, but we’re going to be doing more of this just making sure that all these reviews are out there, not only on our website, but on tinnitus talking to the forums and so on so that people can try this themselves.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Yeah, thank you so much, Dr. Eagleman. Please continue with the research. We love the controls, the test subjects, the different experimental groups tweaking, trying, please we need it as a tinnitus therapist, as someone who works with people every day to help them with their tinnitus. I know the technology part of it is an important piece. And one reason why I love this field is because we’re in this bridge between the brain and technology. And that seems to be the place that you stay as well. Would you like to tell us about your recent book or any other, anything else you’d like to share as we part here?

David Eagleman, PhD.

Yeah, the book is called “live wired,” and it’s all about brain plasticity. It’s just about this general story that your brain is changing every moment of your life actually. I mean, for the people listening to this podcast, your brain is actually different than when it started, because you know, all the, anything that you’ve learned or you’re interested in or whatever, you’ve got 86 billion neurons that are changing their strength of connections and unplugging and replugging and seeking. And you’ve got this dynamic system and instead of thinking of it like hardware and software, which is how we think about everything in Silicon Valley, I call this live where, which is what the brain is. It’s a system that is constantly reconfiguring itself. So anyway, I’ve just, you know, my lab has been studying brain plasticity for 20 years and it’s to my mind, the most fascinating technology that we’ve ever discovered on the planet.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Thank you so much, Dr. Eagleman, for those interested in Neosensory, you can check the description of this video to learn more. Dr. Eagleman have a wonderful day and we’ll talk to you soon.

David Eagleman, PhD.

You too, Ben. Thanks so much for having me.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Bye.

The post How the Neosensory Duo Could Reduce Tinnitus – David Eagleman, PhD – #19 appeared first on Pure Tinnitus.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Pure Tinnitus & Hearing Podcast, episode number 18. Today, we are here with Dianne. Dianne has reached out to me. We had a tinnitus consultation. We became friends and we wanted to share Dianne’s story to potentially help someone else who’s listening or watching.

So Dianne you’ve had tinnitus for six years. Please tell us what you’ve learned over the years and a little bit about your story.

Diane Lambert, Health Coach

Yeah, so it’s good to talk to you again Ben. Yes, I’ve had tinnitus for almost six years now. It started 2015 in November, and, you know, I was working kind of a stressful job and it was a job I really loved. I’m a health coach. So I was traveling the country, I was giving presentations, working with a local company here in my hometown but I had crazy hours. I was up late doing screenings. I would be up early, just a lot of inconsistency in my life. Wasn’t eating at regular times. Wasn’t exercising at regular times. And I remember having a conversation with one of my coworkers saying, you know, this is getting really hard. I’m not 20 anymore. So keeping the schedule is getting a little stressful.

I don’t know how long I can keep this up. And I probably had that conversation a couple of different times over the year well, probably between 2014 and 2015, you know, and I would just keep pushing through because I really liked my job. I loved what I did. And then after a six day trip out to Michigan and we were doing a lot of screenings, a lot of presentations, I came home and the next morning I had to get up early again for another screening. And I woke up and I had this sort of muffled feeling in my ear and also this noise, kind of ringing, but it was sort of low level. And I thought, oh, that’s kind of odd. I don’t ever remember having sort of muffled hearing before but I kind of shook it off.

Then I went to my screening and I was still kind of, you know, aware of it, but I wasn’t really bothered by it. But after a couple of days, it wouldn’t go away. It was just remaining. And then I started to get concerned. And then after about a week or so of that and just being overworked and overtired, you know, I kind of went from zero to about 60 in terms of anxiousness. I became quite anxious, quite depressed. And to kind of shorten the story a little bit, in about three weeks, I lost about 17 pounds. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t get rid of the noise. It was quite disturbing.

So I had to do something and I went and found help. I went and saw a professional. I went to an ENT, you know, I kind of did the route that probably a lot of your listeners have done or thinking about doing or was told to do, go see an ENT. I saw two of them, you know, put me on steroids, which made me crazy. Had an MRI of my head to make sure it wasn’t I think they called it acoustic neuroma, right? They wanted to rule that out and any other physical cause. And finally, I ended up really, I ended up seeing, you know, a psychiatrist and said, I can’t live like this, I need to do something. And they recommended some medication for a while which kind of brought my anxiety down but I didn’t know any tools at that time. I had no tools. So I found you, thank God.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Let’s stop for a second, and bring us back into that state when you’re sort of frantic high anxiety looking for help. You are right now, a wellness coach, and you have been for many years. So how would you have counseled yourself as a wellness coach, knowing what you know now about the relationship between tinnitus, anxiety and how that affected you?

Diane Lambert, Health Coach

Yeah, that’s a really good question. I would have counseled myself a lot differently. Well, I think recommending to get some professional help is always a good idea. So in whatever way, that makes sense for the person who’s suffering tinnitus. So whether that’s real, you know, some professional counseling, seeing somebody who’s a specialist in tinnitus or audiology such as yourself, I didn’t know anybody at that time. Also getting online, finding out information, good information, not going onto chat rooms or forums where people are sort of fear-mongering and telling you you’ll never get rid of it or you’ll, you know, it’s going to get worse or any of those negative things I completely did avoid. I did find another person who, you know, Julian Cowan Hill, and I started to teach myself and educate myself about what is tinnitus, right? What are its causes? How do you treat it? Is it treatable? And yes, it is. It is treatable and yes, you can live with it. And yes, it can get a lot better. So I didn’t know that in the beginning, but after educating myself and getting to the right people I learned a lot and my life is extremely happy and much better than I could have ever imagined living with tinnitus.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for sharing that. And you had sought out different professional help, your nose and throat doctor, psychiatrist to manage stress and anxiety, ear, nose, and throat doctor to hopefully rule out a medical structural cause of hearing loss or something of that sort. And then realizing sometimes those professionals don’t want to have extra resources. So then going to a tinnitus specialist and it seems like you also took a more holistic approach of managing stress and anxiety and sleep. Yes?

Diane Lambert, Health Coach

I did, so I ended up quitting my job. I mean, I had to. You know, I had sort of a, I don’t know if I can say it as a come to Jesus meetings, between myself. And I said, I just can’t keep doing this. The schedule is not good for me. I’m 61 now. I was 55 at the time. I still have a lot of energy and I had all that energy then but I had to realize that stress is a huge driver of tinnitus as you know, and I had to find ways to really mitigate my stress and do something that was not going to exacerbate my tinnitus. And I also had to try to figure out what other triggers could be driving my tinnitus. So it did take me time but the best thing I did was to quit my job and find something that was more suitable for my age and my lifestyle. You know, that was better for my wellbeing. I did get sound therapy, and I know you’ve talked about sound therapy. I did end up going to a clinic in Arizona at the time because I live in Cleveland and there was nothing here in Cleveland that I knew of. And it just so happened I was going there on vacation and I happened to see that they were opening a new clinic the week I was going there on vacation. So I went, I saw them, they were great. I did get some therapy. I did use the sound generators for almost two years straight. And I would say that helped tremendously, coupled with all the education, all the mitigation strategies, the stress management. You know, you do have to eat well, you have to do everything you can to support your wellbeing and your health, because you can’t do one thing and then leave the rest, you know not untouched if you need to make improvements, so.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

And was your hearing in the normal range, or did you have a degree of hearing loss from a test?

Diane Lambert, Health Coach

Yeah, so that’s a good question too. For my age, they said it was in the normal range. They had said I had a little bit of, they said age-related normal loss, but nothing that required hearing aids at the time. But again, that was, you know, a few years ago, but–

Ben Thompson, AuD.

So you reached out to an audiologist at the clinic and you pursued ear-level sound generators which is typically part of tinnitus retraining therapy. And that means also one-on-one education and one-on-one counseling for an extended period of time. So those sound generators providing constant sound therapy, did that provide immediate relief and long-term? Tell us more about that for those who don’t know.

Diane Lambert, Health Coach

Yeah, so it did provide immediate relief. It did. There’s something very comforting of having this gentle, and they actually program it to your range of tinnitus. So it’s not just, they’re throwing a sort of a generic sound generator on your ears, and you have to go through a battery of testing so that they can program it accordingly to your tinnitus level. But yeah, it provided immediate relief, and using it definitely unwound my anxiety and I would wear it for about six hours. It took me a little bit of time to adjust to it just, I mean, it’s tiny. So you don’t really feel the wires. They’re tiny little custom wires, but I still knew I had them in my ears. So it took a little time to adjust. But after that, it was fine. And to this day, six years later, if I happen to have a spike, I still use them.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Okay, so you’ve learned that there’s multiple pillars of success here. There’s multiple factors that are used to habituate to get better, to recover from tinnitus. Sound therapy is one of them. What else did you learn was very beneficial for your experience of getting better?

Diane Lambert, Health Coach

So, definitely having a regular sleep schedule because when you don’t sleep, everything is worse. And as a health coach, I know that and I work with my clients on having a good sleep hygiene because everything else just falls down. It’s like dominoes, you know, sleep is the top. If you push that domino over, everything else just goes badly. So having a sleep routine, getting up at the same time for sure, exercising, I know you have a meditation practice Ben but I don’t have a specific meditation practice, but I know that every day when I get out in nature and I walk to me, that’s meditative, I feel connected to the planet and that makes me feel better. So I suppose I reap, you know, stress management from that feeling one with the universe. And I also have other things that I do. I have pillow speakers. I keep them under my pillow every night. And I listen to nature sounds, that helps me sleep. I stay hydrated. I make sure that I have good connections with family and good family support. So all these pillars of wellbeing make a difference and they all impact your tinnitus to some degree.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

And when we worked together recently, I wrote down a quote. You said, which was, if the level doesn’t get softer, I can still live with that. Can you talk to us and our listeners about the volume of your tinnitus and if or how that has changed over the six years?

Diane Lambert, Health Coach

Yeah, so, okay. So how do I answer that from the beginning? Because in the beginning I wasn’t habituated. And so to me, the sound was really loud. It seemed really loud because I had nothing else to really compare it to like I do today. And in the beginning, when my nervous system was very riled and amped up, I also had a little bit of hyper acoustics. So I couldn’t take loud noises. They would make me very anxious and I had to wear earplugs a lot going out too. Now that we can go back to restaurants I’m not worried about it. But when we were going to restaurants before the pandemic I would often have earplugs in my ears. And I was always concerned about having earplugs you know, wonder if I went someplace that had loud noise. I don’t worry about that really anymore. So now I would say the volume of my tinnitus is, I guess it’s fairly mild. I wouldn’t say it’s loud, there are times when it spikes to me, it sounds loud or louder. So maybe I rate it on a one to 10 scale. So maybe my baseline’s a two or a three, some days it’s a one, some days I don’t even hear it. And then when it spikes maybe it spikes up to seven or an eight. That’s just my observation on it. And then if it really bothers me I’ll put my sound generators in. But most of the time it lands around, you know, between a one and a three, probably in terms of loudness.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Thanks for sharing that because sometimes people are told, look, that’s forever. Tinnitus is forever. And what’s not explained is that the volume, the perception of the sound does change over time. So if I have a very mild pain in my knee then I’m able to live and I don’t even, I rarely think about it and I can still live a healthy, happy life. But if someone tells me, oh, that knee pain because of a certain condition, it’s not going to go away, they’re not wrong by saying that but the language is a little off. So can you explain to us, I took another quote a note from when we worked together. You said that you understand tinnitus more, and that was a big part of understanding what it is and what it is not. In your mind or in your experience, what were the big lessons of learning what tinnitus is and what it is not understanding it?

Diane Lambert, Health Coach

Well, I learned you’re not going to die from it, one. And I learned that it’s not necessarily connected to hearing loss so that just because you have tinnitus it doesn’t mean you’re doing to lose your hearing. I mean, there’s normal hearing loss as we age but it’s not a sign that there’s something medically or physically wrong necessarily with your auditory nerves or your whole auditory structures. So that’s comforting to know that. ‘Cause, when you first get tinnitus, you’re wondering, oh my gosh, you know, you can’t, you’re like am I going to lose my hearing? And that’s not really the case probably for most people. So that made me feel better. And just the education in general around tinnitus, what it is, what it isn’t, and it’s not coming from your ears, it’s generated from the brain and that we’re still learning about it. You know, it’s an area of interest for a lot of people who do this research and there’s ongoing research. And I think there’s always, there’s hope for everybody. Nobody’s a lost cause.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Thank you, Dianne. And your work, when you work as a health coach, what kind of ages or demographics do you typically work with? What kind of conditions or common themes do you see as a health wellness coach?

Diane Lambert, Health Coach

So I work with probably mostly middle age sector people generally from their mid forties or forties to up to and through their sixties. That’s the most of the age range I do. I mean, I’ll talk to anybody that wants to talk with me but that’s my typical target population. And I think that’s because I like to kid my clients and I say, you know, we have a warranty till about 40 and then that warranty expires. So if you haven’t started taking care care of yourself up until 40, you better start now, because it gets a lot harder if you don’t. Yeah, so mostly I would say the majority of my clients want to talk about weight loss and weight management, that most people struggle with their eating habits along with trying to manage a healthy weight or healthy BMI. So that’s a big, big part of my practice and sleep health and stress management and tobacco cessation or some of the others.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Okay, great. And every day I work with tinnitus patients via telehealth who are working through anxiety or stress or insomnia from your perspective, how do all these systems connect? Irrespective of tinnitus, if someone comes to you and says, I’m having stress I’m feeling anxious, we’re having a hard time sleeping, and it’s been like this for weeks or months, what are your simple go-to fundamentals?

Diane Lambert, Health Coach

Yeah, and that’s a great question. So the first thing I would ask that client is if they’ve been to a doctor or had a consult or had some kind of physical, just to rule out that there isn’t anything physically wrong or any physical issue causing their sleep issue or their anxiety or if they have some depression because there are physical causes for these things. And if that’s been ruled out, then I would talk to them about probably starting with sleep. Because again, if you don’t have a good sleep hygiene if you have insomnia, if you have things keeping you up, your anxiety and depression are usually exacerbated. You know, they’re usually maybe made worse when you don’t when you can’t sleep on a regular basis. And it’s not missing a couple hours of sleep here and there, that’s not really the issue. It’s the chronic not being able to sleep. It’s the chronic insomnia and sleep issues. So I would start with that. I think one of the go-tos, you know, is trying to unravel what the source is. You know, so if there’s something causing you stress if you have ruminating thoughts at night, you know, what are some of the strategies that you can do to mitigate that, right? So we would talk about that, you know, journaling or even perhaps seeing a professional. So that’s where it started.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Yeah, starting with sleep as the foundation. And do you have a message for someone who may be in the first three months of a sudden onset tinnitus, it seems that you had been through the ringer of sorts in the first few months of your experience. What kind of advice would you have for your younger self?

Diane Lambert, Health Coach

I would say work with you. Find Ben. That’s my first piece of advice, is, you know, don’t find somebody that can help and support you and help you understand that there is help for your tinnitus. There are many, many strategies that you can learn and adapt to that will help your tinnitus. And if you have questions, these are the places to find the answers, is, you know, on your website, your YouTube channel, your podcasts, because you know, as far as knowing what you know about tinnitus, I think that you are, you know, you’re right there at the top of people to go to.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Thank you, yeah. And from hearing, thank you, I’m humbled by that. Thank you from what you said, I also heard that understanding what can be done and that this is not a forever curse, it’s a symptom that can change over time and in empowering the individual to learn what can be done externally, internally to facilitate that change to make it as quick and easy as possible, and yes, professional support is very important, and it is a great tool. And also some individuals are managing this without. So yes, find the right path, definitely know that there is real support out there, whether it’s with me or someone else.

Diane Lambert, Health Coach

Right.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Well, Dianne, thank you for coming on this podcast episode it’s really great to host you and meet you. I want to include your contact info or website which we will include in the description of this on YouTube for anyone interested. And I’ll leave it to you here at podcast episode 18. If you have any final messages for the community here.

Diane Lambert, Health Coach

I would say don’t give up, because there is definitely hope. You can live a full happy life having tinnitus, and there are ways to manage it so that you’re just going back to baseline. You know, you can be the happy person you were beforehand.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Thank you so much Dianne, and Dianne has agreed to answer any questions in the YouTube comments or put her contact information in the YouTube description. So please reach out and that’s very nice of her. Well, thank you everyone. Again, we make these videos to inspire, motivate and affirm that there is help for tinnitus and there’s a lot we can do. So thank you, everyone. Talk to you soon.

The post How She Beat Stress-Induced Tinnitus – Diane Lambert – #18 appeared first on Pure Tinnitus.

This article will offer a deep dive into Lenire, discussing how much it costs, its effectiveness as a mode of treatment, and the research around bimodal neural stimulation.

Lenire General Overview

Neuromod’s Lenire features headphones that you wear over your ears and a device that you put onto your tongue. Both connections are routed through a handheld device that looks similar to an old-school iPod. The sounds delivered to the ears are variable, and include some high-pitched tones, while the stimulation delivered to the tongue is very light (similar to candy that crackles when put on the tongue). 

Lenire’s website advertises the device as a breakthrough evidence-based tinnitus treatment that harnesses the science of neuromodulation. The device can be used in the comfort of one’s own home to help treat and manage one’s tinnitus. It consists of three main components. First, is the controller, which can change the volume of the noise delivered to the ears as well as change the stimulus charge delivered to the tongue. The controller can also start, pause, and resume treatment at any time.

Lenire is recommended to be used for 30 to 60 minutes per day over a minimum of 12 weeks. It is recommended that each daily session is completed in a quiet and comfortable location, as relaxation helps support the effectiveness of the treatment. The device is intended for prescription use only, and thus is configured and calibrated during an initial fitting with a healthcare professional.

Lenire recommends a specific timeline where after the initial six week period of usage, a review assessment is conducted with an audiologist or other healthcare professional. The device is then used for another six weeks, after which progress is reviewed. This first 12 week period may then be followed by continued use, depending on perceived benefit and effectiveness. The device is designed to be used for one hour per day, and a typical protocol might involve 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening, or merely using the device whatever hour there’s time in the day.

At the moment, Lenire is only available in Ireland and other European clinics in Austria, Belgium, and Germany. Lenire is not currently available in the United States, as it is still in the process of seeking FDA approval.

TENT A1 Clinical Trial

Lenire’s main clinical trial, which released data at the end of 2020, is called the TENT-A1 trial. This trial was conducted specifically with Lenire and involved 326 participants in total. An important point to consider with this trial is the difficulty in controlling for tongue and ear stimulation, as it’s hard to create a “dummy” placebo group where the tongue and ears are stimulated.

In these trials, there were three different groups.

• One group received synchronized stimulation of the tongue and the ears at the same time;
• Another group received asynchronous stimulation with varying periods;
• A third group received an even more delayed stimulation.

Across the three groups in the study, there were some minor differences, but overall nothing significant when compared to the first group. Across the three groups, the researchers measured the participants with two commonly used questionnaires; the Tinnitus Handicap Inventory and the Tinnitus Functional Index. Thus, they were relying on a subjective measure of the loudness of the tinnitus, which adds an additional degree of difficulty in interpolating the data. 

Ultimately, among the 326 participants, 86% showed improvement in the tinnitus symptom severity after three months, 80% showed continued improvement one year later, and 80% said they would recommend Lenire to others with tinnitus. Another 65% of participants also said that they believe they benefited from using the device.

All in all, most participants would recommend Lenire to other patients with tinnitus, and most reported some symptom improvement. While Lenire is not a cure and won’t likely eliminate most tinnitus, it could reduce the intensity symptoms and thus might be worth considering.

Most Common Questions About Lenire For Tinnitus

At the moment, Lenire appears to be one of the most promising types of tinnitus treatment. It promises results similar to those of hair cell regeneration at this point, although the widespread use of the latter treatment is still far off. 

Lenire will likely be deployed as part of a larger therapy or treatment plan. Lenire won’t likely be a be-all-end-all solution to tinnitus, and instead will probably occupy an important place in a treatment protocol that might include sound therapy, hearing aids, counseling, therapy, and holistic lifestyle changes. All of these methods—including Lenire—have the potential to complement one another in treatment.

Below are some common questions pertaining to Lenire:

1. When will Lenire be available in the US?

Lenire is currently in the FDA approval process, with a target for availability set for sometime in 2021.

2. Where is Lenire currently available?

Lenire is available in select countries in Europe, including Germany, Ireland, Austria, and Belgium. If a patient desperately wanted to use Lenire as part of their treatment, they would thus have to travel to a participating clinic in Europe.

3. Does insurance cover Lenire for tinnitus?

At the moment, no. However, there may be a time when insurance does cover Lenire, depending on the patient’s country and type of insurance.

4. Can Lenire be programmed remotely, or can it only be used in person?

A recent audiogram (hearing test) is needed to initially program the device, with subsequent adjustments available via telehealth. Thus, any follow-up, counseling, instruction, or check-ins can be administered via telehealth.

5. Does Lenire work for hyperacusis?

Results suggest that Lenire may also work for hyperacusis. Tinnitus Hub conducted an internal study that showed that those with hyperacusis and relatively good hearing had a high likelihood of success with the device, with a reduction in symptoms in most cases. 

6. How much does Lenire cost?

In Europe, Lenire costs about 2,500 euros. Once Lenire hits the U.S., we can expect the cost to be around 3,000 to 3,500 dollars. And again, insurance probably wouldn’t cover that at first.

7. Does Lenire improve unilateral tinnitus?

Results so far suggest that Lenire is effective in treating unilateral tinnitus as well.

8. Does Lenire improve tinnitus in cases where one hasn’t suffered hearing loss?

Lenire can still be used without a diagnosed hearing loss. Even if your hearing test results are in normal range, you aren’t precluded from possible changes in hearing compared to earlier in life. Hidden hearing loss occurs when cells in the cochlea stop transferring sound to the auditory nerve, and classic hearing tests don’t always capture these changes. 

All in all, while Lenire is still in development, it appears to be helping patients with tinnitus. More than 50% of patients who tried the device would recommend it to someone with tinnitus. 

Nonetheless, it is not useful to hold out for an all-or-nothing solution. As Lenire continues to be rolled out—along with a swath of other bimodal stimulation devices—we can continue to practice good health and wellness and manage anxiety and stress, as oftentimes these offer the biggest opportunities to treat tinnitus while we wait for different technological solutions to become more widespread. 

To learn what may help you manage your tinnitus, please download our free 10-page e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Tinnitus Relief. Dr. Thompson offers Tinnitus Retraining Therapy via telehealth. Please contact our team at Pure Tinnitus to learn more.

The post Lenire Tinnitus Review | New Tinnitus Treatment 2021 by Neuromod appeared first on Pure Tinnitus.

This episode is in Spanish (Español). El tinnitus o acúfeno es un sonido como un timbre o silbido en los oídos.

0:00 – Pure Tinnitus
0:20 – ¿Qué es el tinnitus? ¿Cómo reducir el volumen de acúfenos?
3:06 – ¿Cuál es la causa principal del tinnitus?
8:30 – ¿Se puede tener tinnitus sin una perdida de audición?
13:42 – ¿Los audífonos ayudarán al tinnitus?
16:02 – Como dormir con tinnitus / acúfenos
18:49 – ¿Qué es Tinnitus Retraining Therapy?

Watch the video to know more information about tinnitus.

Check out Dr. Priscilla Lopez’ provider profile.

Thank you for watching this episode of the Pure Tinnitus & Hearing Podcast.

The post Introduction to Tinnitus with Priscilla Lopez, AuD – #17 appeared first on Pure Tinnitus.

I recently studied with Dr. Pawel Jastreboff and his wife. I learned a lot working with them. They are both neuroscientists and have been helping people with tinnitus with one-on-one counseling for many years.

One of my major realizations was that the benzodiazepine family of drugs suppresses neuroplasticity, which is the healthy brain changes that are needed to recover from tinnitus.

Why is this important?

Many people in the United States are on benzodiazepines. It’s one of the most common drugs to help manage anxiety and depression. I am not a doctor who recommends medications. However, as an audiologist helping people with tinnitus, I’m in a unique role in that most doctors who recommend this medication don’t realize that bothersome tinnitus has a harder time getting better when someone is consistently using Valium, Xanax, Klonopin, or other drugs in the benzodiazepine family. These are not recommended because they slow neuroplasticity from happening as quickly as it otherwise would if everything else is taken care of.

There is, of course, a disclaimer here: If you’re taking Valium, Xanax, Klonopin, or other benzodiazepines, there’s a good reason why you’re on it. You were prescribed the drugs to keep you healthy.

My recommendation is for you to stay calm and share this new knowledge with other people. Please don’t panic over the fact that you have been taking some of these drugs without knowing about the side effects on neuroplasticity. At one point, I didn’t know this. I’m an audiologist and I can confidently inform you that most audiologists are not aware of this.  I’m not completely comfortable sharing this because I’m not a doctor who prescribes the medication. Therefore, if this applies to you I encourage you to share this knowledge with your doctor and to recognize that it will be intense if you stop taking the medication cold turkey. I don’t recommend that. Please consult your doctor before you make any changes to the drugs you’re taking.

You can ask your physician to change the drug family from benzodiazepine to a similar antidepressant or anti-anxiety drug that might have a similar effect for you.

In terms of herbal supplements and over-the-counter drugs, there are none that are scientifically proven to reduce tinnitus. If it’s working for you then continue with it. It might be a placebo effect. If over-the-counter or herbal supplement drugs are helping you, then keep using them, but if they’re not then stop using them. 

Someone made a good comment once: “Instead of buying herbal supplements off the internet for tinnitus, make a donation to the American Tinnitus Association.”

To learn what may help you manage your tinnitus, please download our free 10-page e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Tinnitus Relief. Dr. Thompson offers Tinnitus Retraining Therapy via telehealth. Please contact our team at Pure Tinnitus to learn more.

The post Benzodiazepines, Tinnitus & Neuroplasticity: Drugs For Tinnitus appeared first on Pure Tinnitus.

Tinnitus has a significant impact on sleep. Tinnitus or ringing in the ears usually sounds like a high-pitched noise. Patients describe it as buzzing, whooshing, or roaring. No matter what it sounds like, it can make peace and quiet seem impossible. There are two things we know really well about tinnitus. First, being stressed, worried, or having concern about your tinnitus can make it louder. Secondly, tinnitus always sounds louder in a quiet environment.

Difficulty sleeping and insomnia

Around 10% of people with tinnitus report having difficulty sleeping and they often state that falling asleep is one of their most significant daily challenges. As a result, sleep deprivation is a common side effect of this condition. To make matters worse, sleep deprivation can intensify the symptoms of tinnitus. Insomnia is a sleep disorder that is characterized by difficulty falling asleep and or staying asleep. People with insomnia have one or more symptoms such as difficulty falling asleep, waking up often during the night, and having trouble going back to sleep.

A 2014 study found that two out of three tinnitus patients have an associated sleep disorder. This is very high. These patients reported suffering from high anxiety and stress levels due to not sleeping well and also because of the ringing in their ears. But here’s the good news. When these same patients completed tinnitus therapy and use of sound in their environment or in their ears, their sleep disorders were significantly improved.

Five different techniques for how to sleep more easily

The first three techniques are healthy sleep habits and the last two are sound therapy methods. If you really care about better sleep, try a few of these techniques.

1. Relaxing time before bed

Try spending at least 20 to 30 minutes in the evening doing something that relaxes you before you try to fall asleep. This can be reading, lighting a candle, taking a bath, playing music or whatever else that helps you to relax.

2. Limit screen time and light exposure

Limit your screen time specifically on a computer, a phone, or a TV. Turn them off. It relaxes your body to enter sleep more easily. It is especially important to avoid content such as action movies, news and other forms of loud exciting media that grabs our attention. Limit the light in your bedroom as well using blackout curtains or covering other light sources when you are trying to fall asleep.

3. Relaxation using deep breathing, meditation, or stretching

This is a combination of deep belly breaths while you are lying on the floor or on your bed, slowly breathing and relaxing your body. Stretching also works very well before sleeping. You can also practice a guided meditation or try some guided sleep audio.

4. Sound therapy to help enter sleep while lying in bed

Sound therapy can help in two ways. First, the sound can mask the ringing in your ears. Secondly, the sound can calm and relax you. You can use things like a white noise machine, a fan, or a recorded sound of the ocean.  These will help to mask or drown out the noise of your tinnitus and enable you to have a relaxing sleep for the whole night.

5. The sound pillow

The Original Sound Pillow is a small speaker inside a pillow and it allows the individual to sleep while listening to some calming sounds of the ocean, nature noise, white noise, and other kinds of relaxing tones to help you fall asleep easier and faster. It’s very easy to use. You just need to plug in your cell phone to an aux cord that is inside a soft pillow.  You can then hear calming noise through your pillow without bothering your sleeping partner in the bed next to you.

I wake up in the middle of the night because of tinnitus

Some of my patients tell me that they find themselves waking up in the middle of the night because of their tinnitus. Has this ever happened to you? When you wake up during the night for any reason it’s quiet and your tinnitus will sound loud.

So my question for you is: Are you waking up because of your tinnitus or are you waking up for another reason, and then you just happen to hear your tinnitus and latch onto that as the reason why things went so badly?

Can melatonin help sleep with tinnitus?

A lot of people use melatonin to help them fall asleep at night. This may be helpful for a short time period but I don’t recommend it long term. Always consult your medical doctor before taking any medication to help you sleep.

What you can do – Quick Summary

1. Follow a few or all five of the healthy sleep habits I have recommended for one month and monitor your progress. Let us know what works best for you. If it works well, keep at it.
2. Turn on a fan. You probably have a fan at home, so you don’t need to buy anything.  Or you can purchase a bedside noisemaker. This will help you fall asleep faster and keep that deep sleep that we’re all after.
3. We have the sleep index questionnaire for free on our website Pure Tinnitus. You can fill out this questionnaire to understand how significant your sleep problem is. There are other recommendations we have for you.

To learn what may help you manage your tinnitus, please download our free 10-page e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Tinnitus Relief. Dr. Thompson offers Tinnitus Retraining Therapy via telehealth. Please contact our team at Pure Tinnitus to learn more.

The post Hard Time Falling Asleep with Tinnitus? 5 Things You Can Do appeared first on Pure Tinnitus.

As an audiologist, I was not fully trained on holistic ways to manage tinnitus, and there isn’t much discussion in the audiology community about alternative methods to use besides hearing aids, sound therapy, and maybe cognitive behavioral therapy. Therefore, in my own journey as a doctor of audiology specializing in tinnitus, I’ve realized that this more holistic approach is the best opportunity to get better and get the best return on your investment of time and energy.

Five Essentials for Tinnitus Recovery

1. Self-soothing practices

We must have self-soothing practices such as sound therapy. When we talk about sound therapy, it’s usually a combination of using sound from a speaker in the room you are in, ear-level hearing devices, and being around natural sound as much as possible from nature. Try to avoid the situation of being in a quiet, isolated place.

This has become more challenging during COVID because many of us are forced to stay home and there is not much sound stimulation in our everyday life. You can use sound as a therapy to counteract the sound of the tinnitus, and to create more time during your day where you can stay focused.

2. Sound therapy

Sound therapy typically breaks down into devices that are worn on the ear or sound that is played in your room, as well as phone apps or sound you can play from a phone. The brain does not distinguish between sound that is coming from a hearing aid, a speaker, or the natural world around me.

People often think that sound therapy has to be hearing aids and this is not true. The reason hearing aids are popular for sound therapy is because it’s sustainable to have something on your ears that you can directly control to play sounds only you can hear. Others do not have to hear sounds when they are coming directly into your ears. Sound therapy can move with you without having to carry a physical object like a white noise machine or the sound from your phone. But the auditory brain, which is the part of the system that benefits from sound therapy, does not distinguish between sound coming from a hearing aid versus sound coming from an iPhone or a Bluetooth speaker.

Having sound therapy can be very simple. It can be as simple as playing constant low-level classical music in the background. With sound therapy, the loudness of tinnitus can be more manageable. Using sound as therapy is part of getting better. It’s important not to forget or overlook this. When you are in quiet places with loud tinnitus and feeling anxiety, stress, and bothered by it, then having more background noise in your house is a good idea.

3. Mind-body practices

The third essential is mind-body practices. About three or four years ago when I started  researching to find out who in the online tinnitus world is actually helping people get better, I became friends with all the tinnitus experts. They have created online courses, YouTube channels, and written books.  I tried to find the common ground between all of these professionals, because even though we have slightly different perspectives and approaches, there is a lot of common ground. A big part of that is mind-body practices such as yoga, meditation, and anything else that can bring us into a present state of mind and calm us. Mind-body practices may give you some power and control back, instead of being helpless and relying on someone else to help you. Some consistency with mind-body practices, like a guided meditation, a guided breathing exercise, gentle yoga or Tai chi can slow down the pace of the mind and reduce any anxiety or stress that’s built up around the tinnitus.  The physical body and the nervous system can become calmer as well.

4. Calming the mind

The fourth essential is that we must calm the mind as much as possible, and this can be challenging. When I’m feeling anxiety and trying to calm my mind, it can be really hard to do it on my own. Sometimes I need someone else to help me. This might be a good opportunity to join a support group, an online positive community, or to work one-on-one with a therapist or a tinnitus coach of some sort. Anything that can calm the mind is going to be beneficial.

What I’ve found is that the mind can create stories, worries, and fears about tinnitus. It can be beneficial to take a catastrophic thought, such as “ Is my tinnitus going to get louder? Is the rest of my life going to feel like this? 

This is one example of a catastrophic thought about the future with tinnitus. When we unpack it, consult professionals, and get some facts  then the thoughts can lose their power. This may enable the mind to understand that worries or fears about tinnitus are not as real as you once believed. That’s an example of how calming the mind can improve life with tinnitus. 

5. Shift your attention from tinnitus to other things in your life

The fifth essential for recovery and getting better is to shift your attention from tinnitus to other things in your life. Try not to over monitor your symptoms, try not to keep a detailed journal of how loud your tinnitus is in the morning, in the afternoon and in the evening. Try not to hyper focus on the sound itself. If you’re having a day when it spikes, then it can be beneficial to just say: “My tinnitus is loud today, but I’m going to focus on whatever else I would typically do in my day.” This could be reading, listening to an audio podcast, an audio book or taking time to be social and do other things that are not related to tinnitus. This way, you are moving your attention and emotional energy away from tinnitus.  That’s one example of how shifting your attention to other things in your life can be beneficial.

Of course, right now, during COVID, it’s hard to do things. It’s hard to have social groups. Let’s think about what you can do now to shift your attention from tinnitus to other things. Perhaps this means picking up an old hobby that you really enjoyed that you can do indoors. Maybe this means watching new movies – anything that can shift our attention away from tinnitus.

To learn what may help you manage your tinnitus, please download our free 10-page e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Tinnitus Relief. Dr. Thompson offers Tinnitus Retraining Therapy via telehealth. Please contact our team at Pure Tinnitus to learn more.

The post Tinnitus Treatment: 5 Things I Wish I’d Known Earlier appeared first on Pure Tinnitus.

Hello and welcome, this is episode 16 of the Pure Tinnitus and Hearing Podcast. Today we are with Dr. Bob DiSogra.

Dr. DiSogra is a former Adjunct Professor and lecturer of Pharmacology at the University of Pacific, Salus University, and Kean University. We are here today to talk about over-the-counter medications and herbal supplements for tinnitus, side effects of COVID-19 and side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine, how that affects tinnitus. Additionally, we’re going to talk about the relationship between antidepressant, prescription medications, their effect on tinnitus, and last but not least, the drugs FX-322, OTO-313, and other drugs that are being researched to help treat hearing loss, which could improve tinnitus. Dr. DiSogra, tell us how you’re doing, where you’re coming from, and how you serve the audiology community.

Robert DiSogra, AuD.

Well, thank you Ben for inviting me this afternoon, I really appreciate this a great opportunity for me to put some good solid information out to your viewers about tinnitus and the different causes and management. I’m in Millstone, New Jersey. I’m in Central New Jersey, I’ve had a private practice in Freehold for over 30 years and I think this is my 43rd year in audiology. So, I’ve had some clinical work, research work, industrial work, I’ve had a wide variety of audiology, different backgrounds, and different jobs in audiology. But the private practice was my bread and butter for 30 years in Freehold and the teaching opportunities came along. So, I’ve been blessed, I really have. So, I’m really here to help your audience with any answers to the questions that they might have through you about over-the-counter tinnitus relief products and dietary supplements. So, let’s get the party started.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Yeah, let’s get started by talking about over-the-counter medications and herbal supplements that are marketed, labeled for helping tinnitus. I’m very active in the online tinnitus community and one of the common posts people make in the Facebook groups is a picture of an advertisement and saying, hey, has anyone tried this, does this work? You are an expert in prescription drugs, you’re an expert in medications and classifying their validity on tinnitus as well as hearing loss. So, give us a quick overview on, what are the takeaway points you want someone to know about over-the-counter medications and herbal supplements for tinnitus?

Robert DiSogra, AuD.

Well, the first takeaway is the fact that the food and drug administration classifies dietary supplements as food. And as food, it does not have to go through the rigorous evidence-based research that pharmaceuticals have to go through to get approval by the FDA for safety and efficacy, or does it work, okay? So what happens is that you have a food product and there are a lot of gray areas in the law when it comes to marketing these products for whatever the manufacturer is intending the product to be used for.

So according to federal law, if I’m a manufacturer of a dietary supplement, in order for me to sell this product in the United States, I have to notify the FDA, fill out some documentation, and register my company. So when I get the approval to sell the product, my company is FDA registered, not the product for tinnitus. What happens is that, when I get that okay to sell the product, technically I’m cleared to sell the product. So I have the green light and the blessings of the FDA to sell the product. Now, so here I am. I want to sell this product, I don’t have to provide any proof at all to the FDA about safety and efficacy. So, I want to attract people to buy the product, so I will use words like, well, my product is FDA registered and my product is FDA approved, so prove for sale. The company is registered with the FDA, it’s not approved for tinnitus. There are over 80 products available on the market right now, from my research that are FDA registered, but none of them, zero, none of them are FDA approved for tinnitus.

So, when you purchase a product that’s marketed and it’s pretty slick marketed when you purchase a product that’s marketed for tinnitus relief, keep in mind several things. It may not be a safe product, there may be ingredients in that product, that may be harmful, harmful for pregnant women, may be harmful for patients that have cardiovascular disease, there is no system of checks and balances. So, the good news here is that if there is an adverse reaction to a dietary supplement, whether it’s for tinnitus or whatever else it’s being used for, including any essential oils, the FDA has a special program called the MedWatch program, M E D, MedWatch program. And you can go online to the FDA website, they know, just key in, MedWatch, and I think it’s 1-800-MedWatch is the phone number. And you can report this any adverse event that you have to the FDA and hopefully, they will follow through. Now, given the fact that of all of the different issues that we have in this country right now, where is tinnitus on the list of importance? So, there may be some delay in getting a response to that. So, there is a system of checks and balances to consumers, if they’re not satisfied with the product or they have an adverse reaction to the dietary supplement. And what’s even more interesting here, Ben is that the MedWatch program is the same program that you voluntarily report an adverse reaction to a pharmaceutical, to an FDA approved pharmaceutical. So the MedWatch program covers prescription drugs and over-the-counter supplements.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Okay so, when we’re walking this through for someone who is online looking for tinnitus help, we have to remember that when they search on Google for anything related to tinnitus, typically the first few posts that show up on the feed are advertisements. And I’ve of course searched tinnitus many times, many of the people looking for help are then hit with these advertisements for herbal supplements. So Bob, how would you advise someone who is interested in taking a pill for tinnitus, if they come into your clinic and they say, hey doc, are there any pills I can take for tinnitus? Is there anything I can eat or any kind of herbal supplement that might work? How do you counsel them?

Robert DiSogra, AuD.

The first thing I let them know is what I just said in the beginning, there are no FDA-approved products for tinnitus relief. So, really at that point, I try to empower my patients to make an informed decision, how they want to spend their money. I counsel my patients that your tinnitus is a side effect, okay? To you, it’s a complaint, but to me and to you Ben, tinnitus is a side effect, something is causing that. And I think that’s the road patients have to look at. They’ll go right after the complaint and overlook the cause, it’s like having pain in your hand, you don’t take an aspirin for the pain, you try and get the nail out of your hand, okay? If I can use that analogy, okay? So, I counsel my patients about a cause. Now, again we know tinnitus can be a side effect with certain types of hearing loss. We know what’s a side effect of a lot of cardiovascular medications. We know that tinnitus could occur in patients with diabetes, especially younger patients because there are studies that show that patients that have some hearing loss, that are under the age of 60, there’s about a 50 to 60% chance it could be prediabetic. So, there’s a lot of new information, very exciting information that’s coming out as far as tinnitus as a cause from diabetes and other underlying clinically silent, were a very clinically active disease

Ben Thompson, AuD.

And you touched on something interesting there that sometimes tinnitus can be caused by certain medications. What are the common conditions, you mentioned, high blood pressure, what are the common situations that someone will get tinnitus as a side effect, and can you touch on how common it is for a prescription drug to list tinnitus as a side effect?

Robert DiSogra, AuD.

Well, first of all, the food and drug administration, when a manufacturer, when a pharmaceutical company, is doing ethical clinical trials, they have to establish safety and efficacy very early on in the research. We saw that with the COVID-19 vaccines last fall, they have to establish the safety parameters. At what point, you know, at what dosage do more than 50% of the people get sick? And during the course of that trial, they have to report the side effects. Now, these 500 people in the study, and one person says, my ears are ringing, the manufacturer by law has to report, the chief investigator has to report tinnitus as a side-effect, okay? If one person reports hearing loss, they have to report hearing loss as a side effect. So, it’s important to know how many people in the study reported that problem. Now, if 100% of the people, 500 people out of 500 report tinnitus, that’s going to be a red flag, okay? One out of 500, not so much a red flag because it’s only one out of 500.

So we use the adverse reactions or the side effects listing that appears on the drug manufacturer’s website or on certain commercial websites. And there are two that I use regularly. I don’t endorse them so I have no vested interest in them but it’s rxlist.com and drugs.com. These are great commercial websites, they get the information from the drug manufacturers and from the FDA, but, you know, you’ll see information about tinnitus, which you’ll also see an advertisement for buying land in New Zealand at the same time. So, you know, again it’s a commercial site, but the reliability is quite good. And some of these websites even have advisory boards. So, you have to take a look at where this information is coming from. So, it’s important to remember that the FDA does have a handle on prescription medications, and the manufacturer has legal responsibility. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but when the drug is approved by the FDA, that manufacturer has a 10-year window to keep all of the future side effects that might occur, that didn’t occur during the clinical trials. Because clinical trials you’re dealing with a small population, maybe two or 3,000 people, but now when you have 2 million people, using the drug now after it’s FDA approved, there may be some new side effects that may emerge. So, the FDA has a 10-year requirement for drug manufacturers to continually report back on any new side effects that consumers report, and that’s that MedWatch program that I told you about. So, if that happens with an over-the-counter prescription or an over-the-counter supplement, they need to know that, they need to know.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Yeah, that’s pretty big Bob because, in my community, I’m interfacing one-on-one with a lot of people with tinnitus who have hit the end of the road. They’ve gone to different doctors, they’re still left feeling like there’s something they can do, but they’re not sure how, those are a lot of people that I work with. There’s a lot of sensitivity for someone with tinnitus. Part of that comes from confusion and the medical system at large, not always directing them on the safest path. There’s oftentimes a lot of anxiety, stress, and sometimes depression that can coincide with it as you know being an audiologist yourself. So, for someone who is trying to be as safe as possible, ’cause the last thing they want, is for their tinnitus to get worse. But of course, most of us throughout our lives, we end up using some pharmaceutical drugs to help manage certain health conditions. And for someone who is trying to be as safe as possible, they look to see the potential side effects of a certain drug. And I get asked that question a lot, Dr. Ben, should I take this drug, ’cause it listed tinnitus as a side effect? How would you respond to that? I mean, you just basically laid it out, but overall what is the risk, if a few people out of a large sample size had the side effect of tinnitus, is that something to be worried about or is that worth the risk?

Robert DiSogra, AuD.

I don’t think it should be worried about, I think that the patient should have a really good relationship with their pharmacist. Because the pharmacist has the same database that you and I have access to and consumers have access to. And the pharmacist becomes your best friend, their computer systems, their counseling, their counseling skills like ours, are there to guide the patient. Now as audiologists, you and I are going to make sure that there’s no impairment in hearing, that could also be the cause of the tinnitus. But, going back to what you initially said, as far as the stress and anxiety, you know, you have a cancer diagnosis, I mean, that’s terribly stressful, I can only imagine what that’s like. And if there’s pre-existing tinnitus, it could exacerbate, make it worse and now it becomes more pronounced. I’m a firm believer in professional counseling, I’m a firm believer in mindfulness therapy, any type of relaxation techniques that you can learn, even sometimes changing your diet, changing your sleep, exercise, it’s a process.

Ben, I think you know this from your experience that the therapy or the help that you get outside of a pharmaceutical or a supplement is a process. It’s like oral rehabilitation when you’re working with persons with hearing loss or getting fitted with hearing aids for the first time, it’s a process and it can take months, and the patient has to be ready to make that commitment to the process. And I think once they make that commitment to the process, again, like anything else, you know, you drop a big rock in the water, there’s the waves, and over a period of time, those waves will settle down. And sometimes the waves are still there, but it’s just not as pronounced as it was in the beginning. Sometimes just letting people know that they don’t have any major pathological condition, you know, drops their blood pressure, a couple of points also. But yeah, I’m a firm believer in outside help, outside of just take the magic pill and make it go away, and that doesn’t exist right now.

There’s research out there, okay? Looks very exciting, but it’s still too early. Just like what we’re working with COVID-19 and the vaccines, it’s still too early to put your finger on whether or not, a vaccine might be the cause of your tinnitus. And I can talk about the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, we could talk about that when we talk about COVID-19. So I’ll follow your lead, on what you said about the relaxation and the therapy.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Thank you so much because it is important to recognize that there is some risk, there’s some risk of potentially having a tinnitus spike by taking a certain medication. However, it can be really scary if you’re trying to figure it out all by yourself. So like you said, great advice, reach out to pharmacists, have a good solid local pharmacist on your team. Would you recommend working with a pharmacist for managing the medications over the primary care doctor? Because sometimes this can be confusing to a consumer or someone who’s trying to figure this out. So, who has more time, who’s going to counsel the person better about the adverse drug effects?

Robert DiSogra, AuD.

With all due respect to the physicians, the pharmacist is, I think more accessible, okay? Pharmacists don’t close between 12:00 and 1:30, okay? Seriously, and I don’t say that time in because accessibility and most pharmacies have two or three pharmacists working for them, you know, late at night and on the weekends, so there’s always accessibility.

First of all, I’d get a good relationship with the pharmacist and the pharmacist has a relationship with that primary care referring physician. The pharmacist has a computer program that won’t see whether or not there’s any drug-drug interactions, or any drug or dietary supplement interactions that may be causing the ringing or any type of ear noise that you have whether it’s one ear or both ears, okay? Now again, to the people that are watching this right now, keep in mind that, you know, the worst tinnitus I had was four days after a concert. I had lousy seats with this concert, so I didn’t wear my hearing protection. I was like, in like the 50th row way in the back in this outdoor arena. It was a Saturday night and my ringing didn’t stop until Wednesday. And I can only imagine what it must be like to have it all day all night. So, I can relate, but mine went away, I don’t have it all the time. And I know, and I appreciate it, understand as best I can the frustration when my patients are in front of me and they say, doc, listen, and they bring their ear to my ear, You know, they want me hear, the tinnitus is a one-way event. The sound only goes up, it doesn’t really come out. So, I just want people that are watching this to know that the audiology profession, we understand this, we understand this. And you know, it frustrates us, it ties our hands up too when, you know, we can only go so far, but we want you in the process. And that the process means a better relationship with the pharmacist to better understand the drugs from a pharmaceutical side, that’s fine.

When it comes to any hearing impairment or anything related to dietary supplements, your audiologist is just going to come back in here. When it comes to counseling, okay? There’s nothing wrong with reaching out and asking a counselor, do you counsel patients for anxiety Who have tinnitus? And some of them will say, no, some of them will say, yes, okay? And then you have to feel comfortable in that first session or that second session with them to say, yeah, okay, that’s fine. And sometimes just knowing that there’s help, I think can really lessen the tinnitus because it’s got to reduce the vasoconstriction, okay? It’s going to bring more oxygen up, this is where exercise comes into play here, but some people don’t, they can’t get out because of COVID and they can’t get to a gym. So, maybe there’s something they could do in-house with some of the guidance from an exercise physiologist for that matter.

So, there are ways in which you can manage it, it’s just a matter of just like, where do you go, okay? And I’m hoping that this conversation that we’re having today, Ben, is going to help people to say, well okay, you know, I never thought of that, all right, I’m going to try that. But if you try, don’t make it a one-shot deal. I mean again, it’s like anything else you’ve got to, it’s the process of staying with it, okay? And keeping your audiologist informed of your tinnitus, talking to the pharmacist, I mean, that’s what they’re there for. Pharmacists are trained like audiologists, to do the same type of counseling work, to guide you through the maze. That’s what we went to school for, our job now is to get you through this maze. So just ask the questions and now you know who you can ask the questions to. I hope that that helps.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

I really appreciate that, it does help, it’s a team collaborative effort. You had mentioned earlier the COVID vaccine as well as COVID-19 itself. I’ve had a few patients come to me, who developed tinnitus seemingly out of nowhere around the time that they got COVID-19, and those are always hard to parse out because it’s multifactorial, there’s the COVID virus itself, there’s the stress that goes with it and then there’s something physiological that could be happening as well. And then we have the COVID vaccine and how tinnitus could be, and I want to ask you on the data on this, on whether tinnitus is a side effect of the COVID vaccine and does that varies by vaccine? So take the floor on this, I know you’ve been doing some research on this, why don’t you go ahead and update us on what’s going on?

Robert DiSogra, AuD.

First of all, when the virus gets in the system, okay? When it gets in the system, and if it gets into the auditory system, if it gets into the inner ear, into the cochlea, and that seems to really be the point of entry, through the blood supply going into the inner ear, very microscopic blood supply. The first thing that’s going to go away is your hearing, okay? Not go away completely but the first thing that will be affected, are the hair cells that transmit sound to the brain. And when they become affected by the virus because of the change in the blood supply or the viruses attacking the system, the hearing loss is going to be, number one predominant, because you’re just going to have trouble, understanding what people are saying. It’s not an issue, it’s more of a clarity issue.

Number two is that we know that tinnitus is a side effect of hearing loss. And we also know that you can function very well with hearing loss without wearing hearing aids, depending on the degree of the loss. So in the early stages, you might not see a major communication problem, but the tinnitus might be presenting symptoms. So, what would happen is that you would complain about the tinnitus. So, we’ll point the finger at the tinnitus as the cause as a result of the vaccine or result of the virus. But it’s probably more hearing loss related than the tinnitus of directly the result of the virus. So the virus is causing hearing loss and the tinnitus is a side effect of that, okay? That’s my opinion as far as the etiology where it’s coming from, okay?

As far as the vaccines are concerned, you know, before we had this vaccine developed in less than a year, the record, okay? For the fastest, the fastest path, from proof of concept, clinical trials, the FDA approval, the fastest on record is four years, okay? We did this in nine months, so you take a look in less than 25%, there’s still things that we just don’t know, there’s still things that will just emerge. The manufacturers give you a number to call, you call them if you have any type of adverse reactions. Usually, the adverse reactions are pain at the site of the injection, fatigue, headache. Well, that’s good news, I mean, it means the vaccine is working, okay? But when there’s tinnitus that shows up, and usually it will show up from my experience and the emails I’m getting from my website and what I’m hearing from you, Ben, and from my colleagues, usually two or three days later, okay? And sometimes it’s pretty loud, everybody’s reaction is going to be different. And again there it’s added stress and anxiety, so there’s more oil on the fire.

But the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, HHS, has established a Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, V A E R S, Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, and it’s vaers.org, okay? Or you can go to the Department of Health and Human Services on the website and this type in, Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. And then they’re now pulling in information about people’s experiences with any of the vaccines. Whether it’s the new J&J or the Moderna, Pfizer or AstraZeneca which coming down the pipe in the UK. So they’re collecting all this data and right now it’s very early, we just don’t have access to these numbers. So, we’re letting our patients know that, report it. Don’t just say, oh, my ringing in the ears, I got it from the vaccine, report it, okay? It’s going somewhere. And if you go to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System for the Department of Health and Human Services, it’s going into a database. Now I’ve already been in touch with them, and I’m waiting for a response to my inquiry as far as that particular data for tinnitus and hearing loss, and balance problems.

So, ladies and gentlemen, people who are watching this, we don’t know either, it’s still early on. So we understand, okay, we feel for you our empathy is there, we’re concerned, but right now, it’s still new. Remember, the mumps and measles-rubella, the MMR back, took four years and that was the fastest before COVID-19, these new vaccines, that was the fastest beginning to end from proof of concept to FDA approval. That was four years, that was the record. We just said the record now with less than 12 months. So, it’s still early, okay? So just work with the symptom and work with what we know about tinnitus that we knew before COVID-19, and that basically is just stay in touch with your audiologist, stay in touch with your pharmacist.

Remember that it’s a symptom, that something’s causing that to occur. Let’s rule out the organic stuff, okay? And then we go up to the non-organic and non-organic would be the stress and anxiety. The organic would be whether it’s slacks in the ear or some fluid infection or just a change in hearing just because of a couple more birthdays, okay? So, I hope that helps and kind of focus our viewers on the whole vaccine situation or what you can do in the interim, ’cause it’s going to add to the body of knowledge and the researcher, you are part of the solution to help other people maybe a year or two down the road from now. So please, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, and of course the vaccine manufacturer, just let them know what’s going on, call them up.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Thank you for that Bob, yeah, I’ll do my best to help relay that information when you get that data to my audience here as well.

Robert DiSogra, AuD.

It takes a couple more months but yeah, we’ll come back in a couple of months, okay? We’ll do this again, I’ll give you an update.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Sounds good and as with anything health-related, there’s sometimes some inherent risk in taking on a treatment. So, one has to ask, what is the upside of getting the COVID vaccine, well, quite obviously not dying from COVID and not passing it onto your family and community? If there is a chance that your tinnitus could spike or change that may be a risk right now, but it’s unclear, it’s too early to really say that tinnitus is a consistent side effect, would you agree with that?

Robert DiSogra, AuD.

There’s no question about it. It’s only two months since we had the vaccines in the arms, and I’m just hoping that all of these people that have their first shots, that are experiencing this, and it’s my understanding, I haven’t had my first shot yet, I’m still on a waitlist over here. We have a lot of people here in New Jersey and there’s a lot more people that are on the ladder that are in front of me that have a higher risk, so I’m just laying low right now. But, I just hope that, you know, I know that the manufacturers are giving you information to call the number if you experience any side effects.

So, the manufacturers are still, so this is an emergency user authorization, which are also part of the clinical trial, technically speaking, okay? So we have millions of people now and if they find out that 100,000 people, out of 5 million are getting tinnitus, okay? They’re not going to say that tinnitus is a major problem, but to those 100,000 people, it’s a major problem, that’s 200,000 ears that are not working right. So, maybe you’ve to keep a record or keep a log or some type of diary of sorts of when the ringing occurs. Is it louder in the daytime, is it louder at night when the room is quieter, have you had a hearing test? We know that hearing loss can be part of the COVID diagnosis and it can happen later on. It doesn’t happen immediately, we call that, the phrase that they’re using now Ben, is called long-haulers, okay? Persons that have the diagnosis, whether they were hospitalized or not, but three or four months later, now their ears are ringing or they develop balance problems or this other gastroenterological problem’s going on. So, years ago we used to call it late-onset. Now with COVID, they’re calling it long-haulers.

There’s about 10 different diagnosis for the same COVID-19. You know, from COVID-19 syndrome, it goes long-haulers. So, the effects of the virus are still with people even after they’ve cleared and become, symptoms or they’re asymptomatic. So, these patients should stay in touch with their primary care physicians, or their treating doctor, or their pharmacist, because we’re still learning a lot about this. This week I think is the one-year anniversary. There’s still a lot more to go to learn about this. So, we ask everybody’s patients, we’ve all been patient for the past year, but from the medical issues and the concerns, the tinnitus, and so on, the hearing loss, we’re still in the infant stages of understanding this.

So, just keep your audiologist informed, Keep the vaccine manufacturer informed, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, keeps them informed. Even if your tinnitus is tolerable now but you get your second shot and it spikes, you got to let them know ’cause we’re trying to see if there’s some type of common denominator or some type of pattern here that we can learn from this, you know, as other viruses find their way out into the atmosphere.

Ben Thompson. AuD.

Yeah, thank you for explaining Bob.

Robert DiSogra, AuD.

It’s one big experiment.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Yeah, and another topic here that comes up a lot in this kind of discussion not related to COVID but per prescription medications and tinnitus, is antidepressant anti-anxiety medications. I’m going to make a separate dedicated video, maybe we can or I can reach out to a different doctor or a pharmacist themselves or a physician to go really deep into that subject ’cause it’s rather complex. But I just wanted to bring that in, that is a common conversation for tinnitus and medications, are those antidepressant anti-anxiety meds and how the meds themselves are treating depression and anxiety. So, when depression and anxiety are managed, sometimes tinnitus can reduce in volume. What happens when you reduce or taper off your meds, the tinnitus increases in volume. I work with a lot of people who are balancing that, and there are some interesting topics of, can someone still have healthy neuroplasticity to go through proper training and auditory retraining and tinnitus retraining therapy? Is therapy effective when I’m on such high anti-anxiety antidepressant meds? This is a team effort, it’s a collaborative effort. As an audiologist, I try to counsel effectively about how there is a link between stress, depression, anxiety, and tinnitus. And we’re not trying to go cold turkey, taking off the antidepressant meds in a short period of time, it’s a slow gradual process. And during that process, we want to build up the internal resources for health and wellness, so that at some point if you choose to, maybe the individual or the patient doesn’t have to rely on those drugs to live well, to live healthy, even with tinnitus. So that’s a complex issue, do you have anything to add to this?

Robert DiSogra, AuD.

I think the point, what you’re saying is spot on. I think the viewers are seeing right now about what you and I are talking about here. Is that this whole thing with tinnitus and anxiety and the medications, reaching a goal there’s a process. That it’s not a medication magic pill situation. And I think a lot of people understand that, but a lot of people might not, that this is a process. You know, the prescription is coming from your primary care or the psychologist, a psychiatrist I should say. And again, it’s the relationship that you have, it’s a process, it can take several months, it can take several years, it’s a process. So, what’s causing the anxiety and the depression? The magic pill is there to kind of, get the rough edges smoothed out, and the tinnitus becomes a side effect of either the medication or the anxiety. Well, which one is it? Sometimes it’s difficult to really put your finger on which one. I mean, we would like to say, it’s this, it’s this, it’s this, but sometimes we just can’t. And that’s got to be frustrating, and there goes to tinnitus, so it’s a cycle here. So, I think the persons that are taking antidepressants, and have tinnitus because of the antidepressants, stay with your counselor, stay with the psychiatrist, stay with the person who’s ordering it. It’s not just get a script and it’s going to go away and get better and, you know, no, it’s not that at all, it’s a process. And if they recognize the process and they work and blend into the process, then I think the prognosis for success is much better.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Thank you, Bob, thank you for that. And too, it’s been a pleasure to have you so far. To wrap it up we’re going to talk about the newest research developments. Recently released two videos on my YouTube channel, which has gained a lot of popularity, talking about frequency, therapeutics, FX-322, and Otonomy OTO-313, and how those are two new solutions that are being researched in clinical trials, the level of the inner ear, the cochlea, the hearing organ, to try to change the structure in an effort to improve hearing outcomes and potentially improve tinnitus. What is your take on these kinds of drugs? You’ve been following them closely, that’s correct?

Robert DiSogra, AuD.

It’s exciting, it’s very exciting that these companies are doing this. From what I’m reading, a lot of these clinical trials require that the medication that they’re trying is a gel, that is injected through the eardrum into the middle ear, and it’s absorbed into the cochlea through an area called the round window. And so, it is an invasive technique, it’s not something that’s oral. And you know, what I’ve seen is that those companies that are moving along in their research, are the ones that are using invasive injectable procedures to get the drug into the system. So, you can find out more from these manufacturers.

You could also go to a website called clinical trials, all one word, clinicaltrials.gov, okay? And you can type in, tinnitus, and on the left-hand side, you can set the different criteria or other words that you would want, tinnitus COVID-19, tinnitus antidepressants. And then the database will fire up in a matter of half a second. All of the clinical trials that are occurring, with your criteria in the United States or around the world. So if you want to participate or find out who’s doing or where it’s doing to get more information, that’s a great website to start with. It’s a government website, clinicaltrials.gov, okay? Just type in your particular issues and then just read the list of who’s doing what and where, and maybe there’s something nearby and maybe you might want to participate. With COVID-19, there are 26 countries that are doing COVID-19 vaccine research right now. And there’s something like 480 test centers around the world that are looking for people to participate in clinical trials. So if you want to participate, ready to go.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

So Bob, quick question follow up here on those different drug solutions that are being researched. Being scientists who have some message for the public, right? It’s really valuable, it’s really important for us to try to be as transparent about the validity of such research, right? And with prescription drugs, with these kinds of drugs that are tested rigorously, it’s in a double-blind control manner, and in that sense, it’s great because you can’t fake it. But at what point does the research reach the tipping point in terms of the population size, the group, the number of participants, specifically frequency therapeutics, the autonomy group, right? At what point might it reach a tipping point of us saying, okay, this is probably going to work.

Robert DiSogra, AuD.

The chief medical doctor investigator collects all this data from the different research sites that are signed on to be co-investigators. And they will get to a point where they will start to see their data start to increase a plateau. And then when they get to that plateau point for efficacy and safety, they turn that information over to the FDA. The FDA group-analyzes that and they either give their blessing and say, okay, you can go to the next level and try more people or they can say, no this isn’t working, or some of the manufacturers just pull it. They just pull the drug and say, this is not working and, you know, we thought it would work. It’s called the proof of concept, way back early on. And then they try and prove it, okay?

From beginning to end, okay? Wherefrom proof of concept to FDA approval at a best-case situation, it costs the drug manufacturer about 1.3 billion with a B, $1.3 billion, okay? To bring one drug to market. I saw some estimations that the vaccine costs, that Moderna, Pfizer what they spend, anywhere between 30 and $60 billion for this, okay? It’s huge money that’s involved because there’s so people involved. And usually, the volunteers are paid, they can be given two or $3,000 to participate. So, you know, there’s a cost that’s involved here and you see ads sometimes in the papers to get involved with a clinical trial.

So, the manufacturer and the medical team from that manufacturer, there are specific FDA guidelines. On average it can take maybe eight to 10 years for a pharmaceutical to come to FDA approval, okay? And then for a vaccine, again the shortest time on record is eight years, now that’s been surpassed by the COVID vaccines. It’s a process, the FDA says, got to make sure that if you’re going to take this pill, we’re going to get this shot. That, you know, you have to know that we have all of the possible side effects that could occur, and the only way in which you get all of the possible side effects, is to have thousands of people involved in the research. So, I really want to take my hat off to all of the people who volunteered, to be part of the COVID vaccine research over the last six months or last nine months. There are people who volunteer to take this unknown vaccine, to, you know, to help other people. And this is remarkable that people will actually do that. And so we have those people to thank. So the researchers we thank, but also the people who stepped up and said, I want to help my fellow person, my fellow human, my fellow man, and I’ll be part of a clinical trial. So, clinicaltrials.gov, okay? It’s very easy to navigate through and you can find out what’s going on in your area on not just COVID, but any medical problem at all, even dietary supplements.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Thank you so much, Bob. Guys, we are here with Dr. Bob DiSogra, who is a doctor of audiology in New Jersey. Bob, where can our audience find you to learn more if they want to either meet you in person in your local area, at your clinic or find you online with your research into pharmacology?

Robert Disogra, AuD.

The easiest thing to do would be to get me online at the website, okay? If you don’t mind, which is drbobdisogra.com, D R B O B, and the last name, D I S as in Sam, O G R A, DiSogra, drbobdisogra.com. And there are all sorts of information in there, even some communication strategies to help you get the most effective use out of hearing aids, even if you’re not wearing hearing aids. So, across the top, there are different tabs and there’s one MORE, and then you pull down that menu and scroll on down. You can see the diabetes medication side effects, you could see the communication strategies, and you can take a look at some of the COVID 19 publications that have been out in the last year to help people to understand, what we’re trying to do here to help out. So we’re all part of the process, okay? It is a process and we just asked you to lengthen your fuse, and, you know, just your primary care, psychiatrists, pharmacists, audiologists, even a social worker ’cause there is obviously the stress on the family, you know, can also be problematic.

So, you have options out there, exercise your options. And they’re all good options, and everybody wins at that point because, we’re going to be happy that you’re better, and you’re going to be happy that you’re better, and then the trickle down to the family and your friends, it’s priceless. But then, thank you for having me, I really appreciate that. Good luck to the audience, okay? And hang in there, we’re all in this together.

Ben Thompson, AuD.

Thank you so much, Dr. DiSogra, this is episode 16 of the Pure Tinnitus and Hearing Podcast, check out our other episodes to hear from other professionals and be well everyone, thanks, goodbye.

The post Scared About Covid-19 Vaccine Side-Effects on Tinnitus? – Robert DiSogra, AuD – #16 appeared first on Pure Tinnitus.

Can COVID Cause Tinnitus?

Frontiers in Public Health published an article in 2020 called Changes in Tinnitus Experiences During the COVID-19 Pandemic, where they surveyed 3,100 people. Among those surveyed, 237 respondents reported that they had suffered coronavirus symptoms. Within this group, about 40% said that their tinnitus symptoms had worsened. On the surface, there seems to be some relationship between contracting coronavirus and experiencing a change in one’s perception of tinnitus.

COVID can potentially infect the nervous system—which connects the sensory organs into the spine and brain—and can even create autoimmune damage and induce blood clots in the cardiovascular system. Tinnitus can be quite sensitive, meaning that changes to our psychology and physiology can trigger it and even turn it into a dominating sensation.

Additionally, many life changes (including getting sick) can bring about an increase in the loudness of one’s tinnitus. The findings from that study noted how those with tinnitus reported temporary—not permanent—changes. Moreover, these findings were preliminary and they relied primarily on patient questionnaires, so there’s also the possibility that some results were overestimated or exaggerated. Other viral infections like measles or CMV can also cause hearing problems. So while there is a link between certain viruses and their effects on the hearing system—particularly the cochlea and the hearing nerve—the causality is still rather complicated. It’s also important to consider the symptoms of COVID, which are typically fever, congestion, headache, stress, and anxiety. Thus, if COVID causes these symptoms, is the tinnitus caused by those symptoms? Or is the tinnitus caused by the virus directly? It is often very hard to determine one way or another. That said, in some cases it’s certainly evident that getting sick, having a fever, feeling congested, having a headache, and experiencing high periods of stress and anxiety can change tinnitus perception and create what some call a tinnitus spike.

Can the COVID Vaccine Cause Tinnitus (or Make It Worse)?

A recent study in the United Kingdom looked at side effects from the Pfizer and the AstraZeneca vaccines. 20 million doses were administered during the period of the study, and individuals were encouraged to report side effects via the Yellow Card reporting system. Ultimately, a total of 116,000 adverse effects were reported, and out of those a total of 780 individuals reported tinnitus.

This comes out to fewer than one in 32,000 people, thus classifying tinnitus as a very rare side effect. This is a good sign, as many telehealth patients with tinnitus often worry about their condition worsening. You can rest assured that it is rare for tinnitus to arise as a side effect of the major vaccines. While these numbers are contingent on self-reporting, statistically it’s rare that your tinnitus will worsen after receiving the vaccine.

To learn what may help you manage your tinnitus, please download our free 10-page e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Tinnitus Relief. Dr. Thompson offers Tinnitus Retraining Therapy via telehealth. Please contact our team at Pure Tinnitus to learn more.

The post Tinnitus, Covid-19, & Covid-19 Vaccine Side Effects appeared first on Pure Tinnitus.

Acceptance

Acceptance of tinnitus can be described as transitioning from paying unnecessary attention to tinnitus and considering it bothersome, to ultimately not perpetually monitoring it and instead classifying it as a neutral stimulus or neutral sound.

A recent patient testimonial mentioned how the patient would constantly listen and categorize his tinnitus, retreating into the closet of his house, listening for the tinnitus, and asking himself, “Is it louder today? Is it better?” While educating ourselves about tinnitus can be helpful, there is often a point of diminishing returns regarding the amount of attention we pay to tinnitus.

One way to accept a loud spike of tinnitus is by practicing acceptance and noting when you might be creating a story and triggering negative thoughts and emotions. It’s in these types of situations where a therapist, tinnitus coach, or psychologist can really help you with accepting where you are, even if your tinnitus is loud or uncomfortable. By accepting where you are and knowing that your tinnitus is not going to dramatically change, you create the possibility that your tinnitus might get better in subsequent months.

It is often helpful to ask someone habituated to their tinnitus about the importance of acceptance. What most positive tinnitus stories have in common is that, at some point, there was a shift from trying to fix, solve, or chase the tinnitus to simply choosing and allowing the tinnitus to be there. The power of psychology lies in our ability to change the course of how things are going and adjust our reaction to various sensations.

My own journey with tinnitus has followed a similar trajectory. I’ve had tinnitus for the last eight years. It was initially triggered by listening to loud music and attending concerts. I specifically remember being on a college camping trip just outside of Asheville, North Carolina. My friends and I were traveling down a highway along the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and we stopped alongside the road to look at the amazing view. After we sat down, I vividly remember how loud my tinnitus felt, because my surroundings were piercingly quiet. There was no sound whatsoever—no wind, no birds, nothing. We were gazing at the horizon and my tinnitus was consistently loud, so much so that I realized that my tinnitus was constant and that it was not merely a side effect of a loud concert.

Trying to Find a Cure for Tinnitus

In the last year and a half since I created Pure Tinnitus, I’ve sought out the best treatments. During the process, my tinnitus has become a lot more noticeable. However, because I’m practicing what I’m preaching, my tinnitus doesn’t bother me, even if it gets a little louder. And because I’ve been thinking about tinnitus every day—helping people with it, researching it, making videos about it—I often have to ask myself: is my tinnitus louder, or am I just noticing it more? I notice that I often perceive my tinnitus during periods when I’m stressed or anxious, and that when my surroundings are quiet or when I’m trying to go to sleep, my tinnitus feels significantly louder.

To learn what may help you manage your tinnitus, please download our free 10-page e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Tinnitus Relief. Dr. Thompson offers Tinnitus Retraining Therapy via telehealth. Please contact our team at Pure Tinnitus to learn more.

The post Acceptance vs Trying to Find a Cure For Tinnitus appeared first on Pure Tinnitus.

Hyperacusis is defined as an abnormal response to loud sounds. For someone afflicted by hyperacusis, sounds that are loud but not typically painful are perceived as dramatically louder and are often felt as physical pain. 

However, hyperacusis is treatable. Tinnitus retraining therapy is considered one of the premiere protocols. It typically involves the use of counseling, education, and ear-level sound generators. Ear-level sound generators are typically worn for up to 12 months, and are thus considered a form of long-term treatment. After a few months of using these devices and following therapy protocols, patients with hyperacusis will often show significant improvement and their sensitivity to loud noise will typically improve.

From a medical standpoint, hyperacusis is considered to be curable since patients can eliminate their sensitivity to loud sounds after following treatment protocols. That said, hyperacusis is usually known to improve before tinnitus improves.

To learn what may help you manage your tinnitus, please download our free 10-page e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Tinnitus Relief. Dr. Thompson offers Tinnitus Retraining Therapy via telehealth. Please contact our team at Pure Tinnitus to learn more.

The post Hyperacusis: Devices & Treatment Options (for Sound Sensitivity & Decreased Sound Tolerance) appeared first on Pure Tinnitus.

In this instance, something is clearly off and abnormal in the auditory system. Still, your doctor may say that your hearing is normal. While your doctor may not be wrong, he or she may still be using the wrong language. Many patients have normal test results, despite the fact that they have had significant loud noise exposure that has damaged parts of their ears.

Most audiologists use the Pure-Tone test, also known as an audiogram or classical hearing test. With this test, it’s very common for someone with tinnitus to show signs of normal hearing. Millions of people have tinnitus, and a lot of them would be able to score in the normal range.

There’s also a more sophisticated test called the OAE, or Otoacoustic Emission test. This test specifically measures the outer hair cell function of the hearing organ, known as the cochlea. The cochlea has many different cells, and the most important hearing cells are called outer and inner hair cells. For someone who has been exposed to loud noise, it’s very common to have changes or reductions in the outer hair cell function of the ear. For someone who is 50 years old or older, it’s also common to exhibit age-related decline in these hair cells.

Jay Hall, a researcher in the audiology field, and his group have extensively studied the otoacoustic emissions for hearing loss and tinnitus. They found that over 90% of patients who have tinnitus and score in the normal range on the Pure-Tone test nevertheless show reduced function in the OAE test. In these patients, the cochlear outer hair cells are not technically normal, meaning they’re certainly not as clear or as functional as they once were earlier in life.

It’s worth understanding that if you’re someone who has hearing tests in the normal range, there’s a high likelihood that there is damage, decline, or changes to the hair cells in the cochlea. For many, this is an “aha” moment that the tinnitus is actually coming from the ears and not from something else. When the cochlea is damaged, a cascade of events follows where an impartial, distorted signal—not of your choice or control—is sent to the auditory region of the brain, which incorrectly categorizes that signal as tinnitus. It brings the signal into the realm of perception, where a patient might suddenly fall into a vicious circle of hearing it and forming negative thoughts in trying to fix it, which can then create other problems. The essential point is that some patients can have tinnitus with no hearing loss, but can still have their tinnitus diagnosed by the OAE test.

One of the earliest studies relationed to tinnitus, conducted by Heller and Bergman, asked subjects to go into a sound-treated room and report any sounds they might hear. Even though these subjects had normal hearing, after spending 10 minutes in the room they came out and told the researchers that they heard some ringing, hissing, or high-pitched sounds. This was a telltale moment for the audiology research field, as it demonstrated that normal hearing patients are still expected to hear some noise when it’s quiet enough. This revelation can also be helpful in the process of recovering from tinnitus.

To learn what may help you manage your tinnitus, please download our free 10-page e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Tinnitus Relief. Dr. Thompson offers Tinnitus Retraining Therapy via telehealth. Please contact our team at Pure Tinnitus to learn more.

The post Tinnitus With Normal Hearing: Explained appeared first on Pure Tinnitus.

If you’re a new patient—defined as someone who has had tinnitus for six months or less—it is recommended that you first get a hearing test and an evaluation by a medical doctor. Afterwards, work with an audiologist based on those results and act accordingly.

Let’s imagine you have some hearing loss or your hearing isn’t in the normal range—what do you do? First, find an audiologist that’s trained in tinnitus retraining therapy, and follow retraining therapy protocols while continuing to live your life. Don’t give tinnitus any unnecessary attention and try your best to stay mentally occupied and focused on more important things. Focus on your overall health and wellness, and include supplemental therapies that promote good mental and physical health. Try not to focus and fixate on your tinnitus, as that can then create an increase in the perception of tinnitus, which is not intuitive or helpful even though it’s very common.

If you’re a patient with chronic tinnitus—defined as someone who has had tinnitus for six months or more—it is recommended that you first rule out hearing loss as a contributing factor. If applicable, consider purchasing hearing aids with appropriate tinnitus sound therapy built into them. Additionally, work to personally substitute negative associations about tinnitus with more neutral associations. While this can be done by yourself, this would also be a good opportunity to consider asking for help, whether that’s from an audiologist, a therapist, a coach, someone in your family, or a support group.

For example, if you’re having a bad day of tinnitus the automatic reaction is to think about how much you can’t stand living with this sensation. If the tinnitus keeps getting louder, you might think how you can’t see any future living with this kind of sound, and you might question how you can continue on. Ultimately, this pattern of thinking may not be serving you. Try replacing this negative story with a more neutral story in your mind: something along the lines of, “My tinnitus is very loud today, that’s really something, now let me try to bring my attention towards other areas of my life. Let me use sound so I’m not in a silent place. Let me use sound to help me because it’s quite loud today.” That’s just one little example of how you can use neutral thought patterns to deal with the effects of chronic tinnitus.

To learn what may help you manage your tinnitus, please download our free 10-page e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Tinnitus Relief. Dr. Thompson offers Tinnitus Retraining Therapy via telehealth. Please contact our team at Pure Tinnitus to learn more.

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Tinnitus Retraining Therapy protocols

Over the past couple decades, tinnitus retraining therapy has become one of the most comprehensive protocols for managing tinnitus. Created in the late 1990s by Dr. Pawel Jastreboff, tinnitus retraining therapy is now taught every year to a handful of audiologists and is considered the ultimate neuroplasticity program for tinnitus. It has continued to be improved and tweaked over time using modern technology and research.

Neuroplasticity refers to changing the brain. Changing the relationship between tinnitus, our brain, and our ears and hearing system takes time. The major downside of tinnitus retraining therapy as a treatment is that it takes a lot of time. Patients will often undergo therapy for six months since it takes that long before we can consider bringing back some of the protocols, whether that’s sound therapy, ear devices, or certain counseling or education techniques. A six-month period of committing to that protocol is recommended and, if followed, is rather effective.

The goal of tinnitus retraining therapy is typically described as habituation. What does habituation mean for tinnitus? Simply put, it means that we are rarely aware of tinnitus. It may become only a background perception and sometimes the volume itself gets softer. The patient might still hear tinnitus but may not categorize it as bothersome. Many people with tinnitus hear it if they stop and listen for it; even if it’s loud and they’re living their life, they might still hear it but not be bothered by it. 

Thus, tinnitus retraining therapy involves counseling and education, followed by a dedicated sound therapy plan typically between a period of nine to 12 months. While there’s no proven cure for tinnitus in terms of eradication of the symptoms, tinnitus retraining therapy remains a very effective treatment.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Mindfulness

Cognitive-behavioral therapy and mindfulness are other helpful supplemental approaches to sound therapy, proper education, and proper counseling in treating tinnitus.

Regeneration of cells in the cochlea

An exciting development in the tinnitus treatment space involves regeneration of certain cells in the cochlea, the main hearing organ in the ear. There’s two specific bio-pharmaceutical projects that are worth knowing about so that you’re properly equipped in your tinnitus treatment journey. 

First, there’s a company called Frequency Therapeutics that has developed a drug called FX-322 to target regeneration of cochlear cells. While initially showing promising results in restoring hearing loss and combating tinnitus, recent clinical trials of the drug have shown diminishing returns. Therefore, it appears that this project is unlikely to help people with tinnitus in the immediate future.

Next, there’s a company called Otonomy that has developed a drug called OTO-313. Unlike FX-322, OTO-313 does not aim to regenerate cells in the cochlea. Instead, it uses a more complicated approach in order to help with the brain’s reaction to tinnitus in the cortex. Similar to FX-322, clinical results haven’t shown much promise.

Research developments aimed at alleviating tinnitus are welcome and encouraged. And we’re thankful for the researchers who are trying to fix a very hard problem. That said, while these drugs have been cited as some of the most promising in the last few years, neither has seemed to accomplish any breakthroughs at this point. And, frankly, neither seem to be worth the wait based on their recent track record. 

Bi-modal stimulation

Another new treatment for tinnitus is bimodal stimulation. Typically, sound therapy is played through the ears, and would be considered one mode of auditory stimulation. It can come in multiple forms, such as listening to music through an app or speaker or simply listening to your surroundings. 

So pairing a second mode of stimulation somewhere else in the nervous system—like in the skin, tongue, or neck—would make this kind of treatment a type of bimodal stimulation, as it involves two modes. There’s neuroscience that suggests that pairing two modes together with certain protocols or strategies can change the brain’s tinnitus in a positive way.

There’s a group called Neuromod based in Ireland that has developed the Lenire device, which pairs stimulation on the tongue with stimulation in the ears. They’re showing positive results, and while it’s not a complete breakthrough and is certainly not going to completely eliminate tinnitus, it does seem promising. It is available in Europe, but is not available in the U.S. yet. There’s another company called Neosensory, which was started by a Stanford neuroscientist. They created a device called Neosensory Duo, which is a wristband that transmits vibrations through the wrist into what is called our somatosensory system. It pairs this neural input at the same time that you’re hearing certain sounds. Thus, you’re getting two inputs—sound and vibration—traveling through the somatosensory system.

Research suggests that when the brain gets these kinds of inputs, it can make changes to recognize that the phantom sound of tinnitus is not actually there. This enables the phantom sound of tinnitus to be recategorized and restructured in certain ways. 

There’s many different angles to managing tinnitus, and I see bimodal stimulation as a potential supplemental therapy. That said, I don’t recommend it to my patients as the only method of treatment. There’s more traditional protocols like tinnitus retraining therapy that are often more fruitful, so I recommend not fixating on the idea that some device will completely fix your tinnitus. Still, it may help, and I hope it does for anyone who uses it.

To learn what may help you manage your tinnitus, please download our free 10-page e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Tinnitus Relief. Dr. Thompson offers Tinnitus Retraining Therapy via telehealth. Please contact our team at Pure Tinnitus to learn more.

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