Tinnitus Relief – A New Approach

Looking for some much needed tinnitus relief at the local doctor’s surgery may not turn out the way you’re expecting. Family doctors are known to display a casual (or even brutal) streak when talking to a patient who has just experienced the start of tinnitus.

• ‘Just learn to live with it’
• ”Think about something pleasant’
• ‘Try to forget about it’

Millions of people who have gone to a surgery confidently expecting at least a prescription for tinnitus relief, or reassurance that the noise will soon go away, have left devastated with the truth and shocked that a doctor with answers to in-growing toenails and headaches has nothing but the broadest type of advice for finding tinnitus relief.

A New Approach To Finding Tinnitus Relief

tinnitus relief

How can anyone forget such an intrusive complaint that is about as acceptable as a burglar in the living room? Especially if the intruder is screaming in the manner of tinnitus itself. Fear of the stranger, however, would greatly diminish if the surprised householder realized that he was harmless and had no intention of taking anything. And does a person with toothache continue to feel the pain when suddenly discovering his house is on fire?

If the mind can modify or dismiss the most acutely felt sensations of fear and pain, is it not fair to assume that tinnitus can be equally dispatched from one’s consciousness with some alternative tinnitus relief products? I wish it could be, is the chorus answer of the tinnitus population. We think it can be, say a growing number of counselors, therapists and researchers.

Experimental Research Ito Tinnitus Relief

The pace towards this kind of tinnitus treatment has been quickened by the experimental work and recent claims of one London researcher, Jonathan Hazell. His hopeful message, which has attracted attention throughout the world, is that sufferers can be trained to ‘walk away’ from and ‘lose the perception’ of tinnitus. The mixed reaction to his new claims of tinnitus relief has ranged from sheer disbelief and disparagement to grateful endorsement.

Hazell, a fine surgeon with a role in both public and private medicine, understands the ear but also realizes the limitations of the operating theatre. Indeed, the scalpel remains useless as a weapon for tinnitus relief, though many who suffer badly would willingly sacrifice their hearing if the noises could be taken away as well.

Even if that were possible, total deafness would be an extremely high price to pay. Non-surgical methods must therefore offer the most hope, and the best of them, Hazell believes, lies in training people to use their own thoughts as a path to tinnitus relief. His ground-breaking work is being conducted at a small research unit, which he heads, at the Middlesex Hospital in London, in conjunction with the nearby Royal Ear Hospital. ‘We have come a long way and we are on the right track,’ he told the startled but delighted tinnitus world in 1993.

In an article about tinnitus relief published in Quiet, the quarterly journal of the British Tinnitus Association, he explained:

Although the inner ear is often implicated in the generation of tinnitus, it is not with our ears that we hear sounds, but with the auditory subcortex situated near the surface of the brain’s temporal lobe. Sounds take almost one third of a second to reach our sub consciousness after leaving the inner ear and during this time pass through a network of millions of nerve cells (neuronal networks), part of the most sophisticated computerized mechanism known to man! It is this system which allows us to extract tiny, but important, messages from the hurly-burly of everyday environmental sounds. It is this mechanism which allows a conductor of a symphony orchestra to tell which of the violinists is playing out of tune, while the tone-deaf young man sitting in the audience cannot tell whether he is listening to an orchestra or a brass band.

Hazell’s team, which keeps in regular touch with an American neuroscientist engaged in parallel pioneering work in Maryland, has been finding out whether distressed patients might have had different ‘listening training’ to account for their problems. At the same time it has been necessary to look back into the evolutionary process of hearing and the functions of the brain and ear.

It is believed that as Man and his senses evolved, the need to identify threatening noises, such as those from predators, shaped the hearing process. Tiny signals picked up by the inner ear are selected by the neuronal networks in the brain, magnified and then perceived as loud noise. Early humans gradually learned to fear or hate such amplified sounds, in order to respond quickly to their threatening source. The stress of tinnitus triggers a similar mechanism. Hazell’s team has therefore been trying, with some success, to offer tinnitus relief by finding ways of retraining the thought processes of sufferers, changing common belief about the negative properties of tinnitus. It is already claimed that the treatment can remove the perception of tinnitus entirely for some, so that they no longer hear it.

Hazell further explained:

The training program also uses therapeutic wide-band noise (WBN) at a very low level. WBN seems to ‘reset’ the errant neuronal switches and permanently reduce tinnitus perception. We are also measuring the relationship between threatening beliefs about tinnitus and changes in tinnitus annoyance. Just as the conductor is trained to detect the sound of the errant violinist, we are retraining the neuronal networks so that they are no longer detecting the unwanted sound of the tinnitus signal coming from the ear.

Interest and hope among researchers and sufferers throughout the world will have also been raised by a part of Hazell’s studies which looks beyond the ear and brain to find tinnitus relief. It involves the efferent nervous system which controls many of our basic functions, from heart beat and breathing to muscle tension and adrenaline release. The efferent nerves controlling part of the ear could be an important element in the cause of tinnitus. By tracing activity in these nerves as patients undergo various kinds of tinnitus therapy, it is hoped to discover which patients can benefit from a particular approach. And once doctors can control the efferent system selectively by means of drugs, they may be able to relieve tinnitus.

It is easy to imagine the problem as the ear itself containing the physical source of sounds. With the din sometimes resembling such tangible items as a whistle, drill or hammer, it is natural to believe that there is something equally touchable just inside the head giving rise to it all. Hazell warns:

‘Unfortunately this gives a totally false picture of tinnitus from a scientific point of view. The reality is that tinnitus generators are very tiny and minute, barely measurable by our most sensitive laboratory techniques, even though tinnitus perception is very loud and distressing. The perception, however, is quite real, not in any way imagined, and will one day be measured.’

The real power in the hearing mechanism comes from the central processing which is capable of amazing feats of signal detection and amplification. His concluding message when reporting on the tinnitus relief work of his team was quite optimistic:

We are hopeful that one day we will be able to interfere with these brain mechanisms using drugs and even surgery, as well as do things to alter the generators. At the moment, the most effective approach is one which many people would label as ‘psychological’. However, we believe that we have come a long way. We are not simply training people to tolerate their tinnitus, we are training the auditory pathways to change the pattern recognition involved in detecting tinnitus and to eliminate the perception of tinnitus. Although we do not achieve this with all our patients . . . the fact that it is achieved at all means that we are on the right track. For the first time we are able to say that a previously well-established perception of continually annoying and distressing tinnitus can be turned off.

Is A Psychological Appraoch To Tinnitus Relief The Best Option?

Is psychological conditioning the best – maybe the only – chance anyone has of finding cures for tinnitus? Is being taught to reduce the sounds to a minimum the only realistic hope of tinnitus relief to which sufferers can cling? Critics of Hazell’s findings say too much is being read into results involving a small number of people. Hopes could be cruelly raised on the basis of insufficient evidence available. And is it feasible to construct a whole new field of tinnitus treatment on something which demands a highly personalized contribution from the patient, namely the training of each unique mind and personality to achieve welcome but subjective tinnitus relief?

There is certainly no shortage of volunteers keen to try the retraining techniques, but no practicable arrangements are possible for more than the tiniest fraction of them to join the specialized course now running in London and a few other clinics. For the foreseeable future, then, the treatment, promising though it is, is a tantalizing but unobtainable prospect. Doubts, meanwhile, remain. For badly stressed sufferers, their noises are just too loud and pervasive for them to walk away from them. By and large they pin their hopes of finding that much sought after tinnitus relief on drugs or surgery, at some future date.

There is good news however. Another medical researcher has recently released the Tinnitus Miracle System which is based on over 45,000 hours of medical research and clinical trials. It includes details of some of the most effective tried and tested tinnitus remedies that actually work, and are widely available. The creator, Thomas Coleman also has thousands of testimonials of very satisfied customers who finally managed to find some elusive tinnitus relief. In many cases the tinnitus was eliminated completely. For more information see the Tinnitus Miracle Review article.