Tinnitus—A Noise to Live With?

BEETHOVEN, the German writer Goethe, and the Italian sculptor Michelangelo—all may have had it. The ancient Egyptians may likewise have been aware of it, apparently referring to the malady as “a bewitched ear.” Today it is called tinnitus, and an estimated 15 percent of the population of the Western world have it frequently or constantly. About 5 people out of 1,000 are afflicted severely.

Just what is this annoying malady? The word “tinnitus” comes from the Latin tinnire, “to tinkle,” and is described as a “sound in the ears not caused by any external stimulation.” According to The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, it may be a “buzzing, ringing, roaring, whistling, or hissing quality or may involve more complex sounds that vary over time. It may be intermittent, continuous, or pulsatile.” The volume of this noise can range from hardly audible to disturbingly loud. And it is a sound that sufferers cannot turn off. The unrelenting noise can thus trigger a host of side effects: emotional distress, sleeping problems, pain, concentration difficulties, fatigue, communication problems, and depression.

What Causes the Ailment?

After the onset of tinnitus, a sufferer may nervously wonder what has gone wrong. He may fear that he has had a cerebral hemorrhage, has suffered a mental disorder, or has a tumor. Fortunately, tinnitus is rarely caused by a serious ailment. Some have developed tinnitus after a head injury. And Professor Alf Axelsson, of Göteborg, Sweden, a researcher and expert on the subject of tinnitus, told Awake!: “Some drugs, such as aspirin in high doses, can produce tinnitus as a temporary side effect.”

By and large, though, tinnitus is the result of an ear disorder. Professor Axelsson explained: “The problem is usually in the part of the inner ear called the cochlea, with its 15,000 or so microscopic sensory hair cells. If some of them have been damaged, they can send and receive an unbalanced stream of nerve signals. This is perceived by the sufferer as noise.”

The cause of such ear damage? According to Professor Axelsson, one cause of tinnitus is exposure to loud noises. Those who wear stereo headphones, for example, often do themselves harm by playing their music at high-decibel levels. Tinnitus is one possible result.

Of course, it’s good to keep in mind the comment made by Richard Hallam in his book Living With Tinnitus: “The body is not a completely silent place and so a certain degree of ‘tinnitus’ is normal. Sounds result from the mechanical movement of muscles, bones, blood and air. . . . It is supposed that in everyday conditions, these background noises are masked by the louder sounds of the environment—they are simply not heard.” Reading this article may have made you more aware of those background noises. However, they are not a problem for most people.

How Is It Treated?

What if you are seriously afflicted by this ailment? The first thing you should do is contact your doctor. He will help you to find out if there is a treatable disorder behind your symptoms. Sad to say, in most cases there is no cure for the noise. But there are a number of things that can be done to help you live with it.

▪ Surgery: The brochure Tinnitus, published by The British Tinnitus Association, states: “Sometimes tinnitus is caused by a disorder in the middle ear, and occasionally by an abnormality in blood vessels or muscles in or near the ear. In these very rare cases there is a possibility of completely eliminating tinnitus by surgery.”

▪ Medication: If a sufferer has difficulty sleeping or suffers anxiety, tension, or depression, a doctor may prescribe sedatives or antidepressants to ease these symptoms.

▪ Hearing Aids and “Maskers”: If there is a slight hearing loss, a hearing aid can be of great help. There is also a device called a masker, which looks like a hearing aid. It produces a background sound to mask the tinnitus sounds. Sometimes, though, simply playing the radio or running a fan can have a similar effect.

▪ Other Treatments: Professor Axelsson told Awake!: “Hyperbaric oxygen therapy may prove helpful for some patients. This involves placing the sufferer in a pressure chamber, where he is subjected to pure oxygen. This may enhance healing of the inner ear.” And since for some patients the symptoms of tinnitus seem to worsen when they are tense or anxious, some doctors have recommended various relaxation-training therapies.a However, learning to relax and avoiding physical and mental stress as much as possible may be helpful.

Living With the Ailment

As yet, no real cure for tinnitus is on the horizon. So tinnitus is a noise you may have to learn to live with. Says the book Living With Tinnitus: “I and my colleagues now strongly believe that the normal response to tinnitus is the gradual development of tolerance.”

Yes, you can teach your brain to ignore the sound, to view it as something not worth paying attention to. Do you live in a noisy neighborhood? Or do you run a fan or an air conditioner? At first, those noises may have irritated you, but after a while you simply ignored them. In fact, you may even have learned to sleep with those noises! Similarly, you can learn not to pay too much attention to your tinnitus.

Tinnitus is one of many maladies that must be endured until the arrival of God’s coming new world, in which “no resident will say: ‘I am sick.’” (Isaiah 33:24) In the meantime, tinnitus can be a frustrating problem, but it need not ruin or dominate your life. Be assured that this is a noise you can learn to live with!

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A checkup by a qualified physician can be the first step in learning to live with tinnitus