So tinnitus is what we describe as any kind of sound, whether that be ringing, buzzing, whistling, rushing,  any kind of noises that are experienced inside the ears or the head that aren’t being from the sounds around you, so there’s no actual noise there but you’re still hearing the sounds.

It varies from person to person in volume, in pitch and the type of noise that it can be. So, I see some patients where they think “oh tinnitus is only the high frequency ringing” when it can be the sound of a jet plane taking off.

Most people I would say, once they understand a bit about their tinnitus and understand that there’s nothing necessarily wrong, that they haven’t got a brain tumour, which a lot of people do question, I think as long as they know that there is nothing untoward going on then it does actually help massively with the treatment of tinnitus.

So in terms of looking into it I would come for an assessment and we can talk about it, we can do a hearing check, we can do a tinnitus full assessment as well if necessary and really work out where we are going to go with it in terms of management.

 

MANAGEMENT OF TINNITUS

So management of tinnitus can vary from person to person a lot of the time I would say that people habituate to their tinnitus really  well and no management is needed  and it may just be that we educate you about your tinnitus , check there is nothing else going on and that there’s no particular cause of it as it is very common and it doesn’t necessarily mean that there is anything happening and a lot of the time that’s enough. Also it may be that we talk about ways that you can basically take your concentration away from the tinnitus as a lot of the time its like a vicious circle of  once you hear it sounds louder and you hear it some more, so they may be techniques like meditation, relaxation techniques, or listening to sounds in your environment, keeping  yourself busy, these are all the things that we would be chatting about.

When it comes to devices this is when in some people’s cases their tinnitus is very intrusive and they are looking for something to improve it, where other techniques haven’t necessarily been successful.

You can get what are known as tinnitus maskers, you can also get hearing devices that play a masking setting into the hearing aid so this is basically another noise that is played at the same time and a lot of the time people find that this can help to reduce their concentration on the tinnitus.

 

It may be that you have a combination of the all the different management techniques and its just about working out what is going to be right for you