How To Cure Tinnitus :Ringing in the ears
Pretty much everybody has experienced hearing a ringing noise in your ears after listening to loud music. That noise is pretty much the life-altering condition that people with tinnitus have to entire 24/7.
The condition can present itself with a whistling, buzzing, chirping or even shrieking sound, and it can appear to come from inside your head or from a distance. It becomes an irritating and distracting part of your everyday life, and it can be caused by a variety of unpredictable factors, such as loud noise, compact earwax, problems with the middle ear, such as tumors and infections, and a large array of drugs that impact the internal ear, called ototoxic drugs, that damage the nerves causing the condition.
What happens inside your ear is that some of inner ear's hair cells that reside in the cochlea, which usually interpret the sound waves that get into your ear to make them into sound that your brain can process, are somehow, for whatever reason, damaged, so they don't pass along all the signal that comes to them from the outer world.
The brain, which is expecting sensory stimuli to come from the cochlea, doesn't receive as much as it is expecting, so it does the equivalent of "turning up the volume" from the cochlea, in an attempt to detect the missing information. Just like turning up a guitar up can sometimes produce static noise, this operation the brain does results in excess sensory stimuli - the tinnitus sound. How to cure tinnitus is a different matter altogether.
There isn't a single cure that works for everybody, but some methods are common in treating this situation and will help you relieve the symptoms. Cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT is the most common method to learn to deal with tinnitus. Patients keep a diary and perform excersices to build the coping skills, so that while the sound doesn't disappear, the are able to keep it from interfering with their daily activities.
The costly Tinnitus retraining Therapy, or TRT, is a technique that aims to help the auditory system (your ears and ear nerves) to the signals originating from tinnitus, in order to make them less noticeable or less bothersome. The treatment itself consists in the usage of a sound generating device that is inserted into the ear to generate a noise that overrides the tinnitus.
Masking devices are also used to relieve the symptoms; they are work like eating aids and produce noises that remove the sound for a while after they are removed. But besides these palliative treatment, is there a way to actually cure tinnitus once and for all? Experiments of the Yale Clinical Research Program have been focusing on a technique called Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMC).
This treatment consists in applying an electromagnet on the patient's head, and generating through it pulses of magnetic field that affect the brain, slowing down key areas of abnormal activity in order to suppress the "wrong" signals. Several of the country's brightest clinical scientists are involved in this avant-garde field of medical research, and the technique has so far proven so effective that it's now been studied for use on patients of schizophrenia in order to suppress hallucinatory voices. You can read more about rTMC by looking up articles by PhD R.E. Hoffman and MD K.A. Hawkins.