Tinnitus is not new. But perhaps it’s new to you, like a loud used car you can’t return. Usually, though not always, tinnitus presents as a ceaseless buzzing or ringing in the ears. At times, the sound is really intense. Symptoms fluctuate significantly, but this is the point: if tinnitus is troubling you, you might be searching for some new ways to manage your symptoms.
Fortunately, new therapies and treatment options are being formulated that aren’t cures for tinnitus but can help you manage it. Some of those therapies even concern your tongue.
The Most Recent Way to Handle Tinnitus
Possibly the newest tinnitus treatment that we’ve seen does indeed offer quite a bit of potential, even if it sounds a little unusual initially. This device, developed at the Trinity College School of Medicine in Dublin, stimulates both the ear and the tongue. Bi-modal neurostimulation is the technical term for this method.
According to the first tests of this device, the results were pretty striking. Most individuals received treatments for a duration of twelve weeks or so. Over those 12 months, those same people observed a dramatic decrease in tinnitus symptoms. But this type of therapy is still in testing and not widely available yet.
What Can I do Now to Find Tinnitus Relief?
Of course, it takes years for devices to go from research and development to patient accessibility. So perhaps you’re wondering what can be done now to help control your tinnitus.
There are, luckily, some tinnitus management technology that has recently come onto the market. And one of the best new methods of managing tinnitus is something you’ve probably already heard of: your hearing aid.
Here’s how it works:
Your hearing aid can give you something else to listen to. One reason why tinnitus is more noticeable as your hearing wanes is that the stays loud while everything else becomes quieter. The volume of the exterior world is raised by hearing aids. That doesn’t lower the volume of your tinnitus, but it might make the ringing less obvious.
Your hearing aid can mask the noise. If your hearing loss is relatively moderate, then a masking device might be the best way to address your symptoms. A hearing aid has a similar appearance to a masking device. And masking technology can be incorporated into modern hearing aids. This technology will emit sounds designed to mask your tinnitus symptoms. Sometimes this will be a tone, in other cases, it might be some white noise. Whatever is going to best hide the ringing in your ears.
Obviously, this is only a starting point. We can show you devices that work best with tinnitus. Contact us.