Tinnitus is an extremely common symptom indicating a change in the hearing system.

Often accompanying hearing loss, it affects upwards of 10% of the population to varying degrees. For some people it’s a pesky background hum heard only when in quiet, while for others it’s a needle-sharp sound, which pierces their daily hearing. For those most affected by tinnitus it can combine with anxiety and depression to affect sleep, concentration, and negatively affect quality of work and family life.

For almost everyone, tinnitus is unwanted. But there are a wide range of very effective management and treatment solutions for it.

Our understanding of tinnitus has advanced tremendously in the last 25 years. Once thought of as being an “ear” problem, it is now recognized as resulting from a complicated interplay of the ear, auditory brain, other senses and regions of the brain associated with thoughts and emotions.

The more attention you give tinnitus, the worse it can seem

Tinnitus results from a cascade of events in which change in the hearing system, usually with hearing loss, leads to compensation mechanisms within the hearing and associated parts of the brain that create new activity that becomes heard as sound. Attention, memory, emotion and even our personality drive our awareness and thoughts about the tinnitus.

Its unusual nature – sound without an outside source making it, creates an “auto-focus” for the auditory system, making it difficult to ignore.

For those worst affected by tinnitus it can take on an importance disproportionate to its loudness and meaning.

Given the absence of effective medications and surgery, the mainstay of tinnitus therapy has been to correct for any hearing deficit through hearing aids and then draw attention away from the tinnitus through listening to other sounds.

Sounds that assist in relaxing (e.g. ocean waves) and sounds that interfere with hearing tinnitus (e.g. rain) are often used through headphones or with the hearing aids.

Along with the use of hearing aids, the following strategies can help:

• Knowledge – typically the more you understand about tinnitus and what may trigger or exacerbate your tinnitus, the more you can reduce its impact.
• Goal-setting – a key part of improving the quality of your life is to take control.
• Sleep hygiene – simple techniques can improve your sleep quality that in turn will greatly improve other aspects of your day to day living.
• Relaxation techniques – this includes the use of progressive relaxation breathing techniques, meditation and music.
• Attention control – this involves training yourself to shift your auto-focus away from tinnitus onto interesting sounds.
• Communication strategies – enhance the effectiveness of hearing aids and reduce the strain of hearing.

Be discerning about the treatment advice and information you listen to

As mentioned, tinnitus can range from a mild affect through to being catastrophic for the listener.

Many persons with tinnitus try to live through the experience and don’t see an audiologist or physician. Some seek help from the internet. Others search out specialized tinnitus clinics and clinicians with strong interest in the area.

This means that many people that could be helped aren’t; they run the gauntlet of the wide quality of information (and misinformation) on the Internet, or they have to travel to centres where tinnitus expertise is located.

Check out TinnitusTunes for evidence-based advice and solutions

For many years the University of Auckland’s Hearing and Tinnitus Clinic was the only dedicated tinnitus clinic in New Zealand.  This meant we managed clients just curious about tinnitus through to those travelling from remote parts of the country with severe tinnitus.

For some clients we just needed to provide some evidence-based information to circumvent fears and malformed beliefs often acquired through the Internet.

Other times we had to discover ways to provide a full management plan to clients having to travel many hours for each visit.

As an outreach of our clinic and to address the increasing demand from clients remote from our clinic, nationally and internationally, TinnitusTunes was developed.  The Tinnitus Tunes website has a full suite of information, podcasts, video clips and sound libraries to provide both people with tinnitus and their clinicians with sound therapy and counselling support. We’ve created an evidence-based website that can be trusted and that both bridges the gap between tinnitus sufferers and clinicians, and assists clinicians by providing tools to enhance clinical practice.

It is possible to manage tinnitus, it’s just a matter of finding what works best for you

Although medical cures for tinnitus are some way off, effective management is available and persons with tinnitus need not suffer.

Technology is beginning to offer new solutions to this hard-to-treat condition. The internet and web based therapies have a strong role to play in this field, but in surfing the web a critical and a sceptical eye is needed. Try to avoid claims of miracle cures that seem to good too be true.

Grant D Searchfield BSc MAud(Hons) PhD is an Associate Professor in Audiology at the University of Auckland where he is responsible for teaching the hearing aid course. He is a director of the University of Auckland’s Hearing and Tinnitus clinic and scientific director of TinnitusTunes an online tinnitus treatment resource. Grant is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the American Tinnitus Association.

He is an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Audiology and an International editorial associate for the Journal of the American Academy of Audiology.