Just about everyone has had the experience of being at a concert, working with power tools, or just being in a noisy environment. When you finally step away from the noise, the whole world sounds muffled for awhile and your ears are ringing like mad. That phenomenon is called Tinnitus or Tinnitus, depending on where you were brought up.

The idea is that an insult has occurred to the ear and it has caused a neurological response. The catch is sometimes the sound comes back after you’ve been to the rock concert, but the ringing does not. Patients who been exposed to any kind of noise exposure are likely to experience tinnitus. People often ask “Can you cure tinnitus?” You can cure a broken bone and you can cure appendicitis, but you really don’t cure a nerve loss. However, you can treat it. So, let me share with you just a few concepts related to tinnitus.

• There currently is no known cure for tinnitus. Although it is important to note that a BHI study published in Hearing Review found that many tinnitus sufferers report that their hearing aids significantly help them with their tinnitus.


• Nearly thirty million Americans—almost twice as many as previously believed—suffer from persistent, chronic tinnitus. That’s about ten percent of the U.S. population. And for people ages 65 to 84, that number jumps to almost 27 percent. What’s more, tinnitus is now the number one service-connected disability of returning military personnel from Iraq and Afghanistan.


• The BHI study found that 43.5 percent of survey respondents with tinnitus were helped at least mildly with hearing aids. And 3 out of 10 were helped moderately-to-substantially. For those whose where hearing health professionals used best practices in fitting hearing aids, that figure jumped to 50 percent.


• It is important for BHI and the hearing health community to help promote Tinnitus Awareness Week as part of our Better Hearing Month efforts, especially because relatively few people seek help for their tinnitus—despite the fact that there are effective therapies available, including the use of hearing aids, to help tinnitus sufferers.

There have been individuals who have just been so annoyed with the head noises that they have just felt like it was distracting, interfering their life and they said, “Doc, I’ll do anything” and they’ve actually had the nerve severed. The catch is they may have a little quiet time and then the sound came back.  So what can we conclude from this? That it’s not just the ears that are involved. It’s the whole central nervous system that is part of the issue.

So let’s talk about a few concepts that would at least introduce you to the subject. It’s been said that we hear with our brain when we actually perceive with our brain. The human brain organizes information, decides what’s important and what’s not important and sometimes it focuses on certain things. Occasionally, the brain focuses on that high pitched ringing or buzzing, or crickets or what have you and its starts to interfere with our life.

Almost everyone that has a high frequency hearing loss also experiences some variation of head noises. As a result, as the hearing loss gets declines, the ringing in the ears will increase.