Tinnitus Cure -- Is it Music to Your Ears

Tinnitus is the medical name for what people describe as `ringing in the ears`. The sound can be not only ringing but hissing or any other sound that is being heard by the sufferer. It is being produced within the ear and not as a result of external sounds. It cannot generally be heard by others but only by the sufferer themselves. There are very many causes of Tinnitus such as exposure to loud noises over a period of time, ear infection or trauma to the ear. In some cases it has been caused by taking various medications. In fact anything that can cause damage to the inner ear.

In normal circumstances sounds collected by your ears are passed into the ear channel onto the ear drum. This is connected to the inner ear by an arrangement of three very tiny bones. The inner ear contains the cochlea and auditory nerves. The cochlea is a coiled spiral tube that contains a great many hair cells. These hear cells collect the vibrations and convert them into electrical pulses which are transmitted to the brain which converts them back into recognisable sounds. If the hair cells are damaged in any way these electrical pulses may become distorted and the brain may interpret these slight distortions as sounds resulting in Tinnitus.
Other causes of Tinnitus can be a build up of wax in the ear channel, infection of the inner ear, meniere`s disease, which affects the inner ear and also can cause problems such as vertigo, anaemia causing the rapid circulation of blood etc.

By looking on the web it can be seen that there are hundreds of recommendations for products or therapies that purport to cure Tinnitus. However because Tinnitus is usually caused by damage to the inner ear in some way, herbal medicines or other drugs are not effective unless the cause is purely an infection which can be cured.

Tinnitus Masking is one of the ways that allows you to manage it. This involves playing sounds that mask the ringing in your ears. This can be done by listening to your favourite music etc. This method will not stop the Tinnitus but it will be swallowed up in the rest of the music sounds. The time that this could be very important is when you are trying to get to sleep. If you had music playing in your ears it could make you relax instead of concentrating solely on the ringing in your ears. Having good nights sleep greatly helps with the following day to bringing stress levels down which can help with the living with the Tinnitus.
There have now been new developments in the treatment of Tinnitus where it is proposed that doctored music can help sufferers combat the condition.
It has been found that by regularly listening to the doctored music, sufferers have gained long term relief.

How the music is doctored is that a sufferer choice of music is altered so that the frequencies that are the same as those as the Tinnitus sound frequencies are removed. It is thought that by removing these sound frequencies, the brain is being trained to understand how it hears the Tinnitus noise and so reducing its effect.
In laboratory tests it was found that there was a significant reduction in Tinnitus loudness after 6 months compared with sufferers who had not undertaken these tests. Scan of the brain also found that there appeared to be a permanent change in the way the Tinnitus sounds were being processed.

It has been suggested that regular listening to the doctored tape music had retrained the brain in how it hear sounds in the Tinnitus frequency.

There are now Hearing Aids on the market that have built in circuits that help to overcome the problem of Tinnitus. For more information on these Hearing aids visit DIGITAL HEARING AIDS