The cause of tinnitus, a persistent ringing or buzzing in the ears, has long puzzled scientists. However, there is one thing that all hearing professionals agree on, you are more likely to experience tinnitus if you also suffer from hearing loss.
Some of the main factors that play a role in hearing loss are genetics, age, and lifestyle. And while many of us think of hearing loss as being obvious, the reality is that some mild hearing loss can go undetected. Still worse, even a minor case of hearing loss raises your risk and likelihood of developing tinnitus.
It isn’t a cure, but hearing aids can help manage tinnitus
Tinnitus can’t be cured. However, hearing loss and tinnitus symptoms can be improved as well as quality of life by using hearing aids. In fact, the similarities between hearing loss and tinnitus are rather remarkable.
The pitch or frequency of the ringing one hears when dealing with tinnitus is usually in sync with the type of hearing loss that person encounters. As an example, if someone has hearing loss in the high-frequency range, they will frequently hear a high-pitched ringing from tinnitus. Some individuals believe this parallel to be a result of the brain trying to compensate for a lack of acoustic stimulation at that level by generating a similarly pitched tone of its own.
A traditional hearing aid can essentially hide the ringing or buzzing associated with tinnitus by replacing it with the appropriate sounds. Luckily, tinnitus symptoms can be treated in other more advanced ways than traditional hearing aids.
Specialized hearing aids to decrease tinnitus symptoms
Hearing aids work by picking up natural sounds from your environment and amplifying them to a level that allows you to hear. Even though it might be simple in design, that amplification of noise, be it the din of a dinner party or the rattle of a ceiling fan, is critical in teaching your brain to receive particular stimulations once more.
But other combinations of strategies like sound stimulation, counseling, and decreasing stress can also be used to improve those amplification efforts and provide a more comprehensive treatment approach.
Some hearing aid manufacturers attempt to decrease tinnitus symptoms by using irregular rhythms of fractal tones. These rhythmically irregular tones can detract from the constant and regular tones tinnitus sufferers hear. The ringing is drowned out by pleasant, wind chime-like sounds generated by the most common fractal tones rather than simple white noise which can also be helpful in some cases.
Mixing natural sounds from your environment with your tinnitus is the goal of other specialized devices. A white noise generator will be used in this approach, which can be calibrated by a hearing specialist to help lessen your specific tinnitus symptoms..
Whether it’s through sound therapy, blending, or a white noise mechanism, each of these specialized devices has a common goal of distracting the user away from the ringing or buzzing of tinnitus.
It’s true that there is no cure for tinnitus, but for at least some of the 50 million dealing with the condition, hearing aids provide an alluring possibility to reduce symptoms and live a better quality of life.
Have more questions about tinnitus?
For more info on decreasing tinnitus symptoms, check out our tinnitus section or call for a consultation.
