Ask HN: Has anyone gotten complete, permanent relief from tinnitus?

When you twist your head around, do you hear a grinding noise? For me, it’s almost like a cardboard box being dragged across a sandy floor. It is a real noise because I’ve been able to record it with my phone.

I also have tinnitus. I wonder if it’s all related?

Just a reminder for folks who think they just have tinnitus to get their hearing checked. When I first started hearing ringing in one ear, I didn't realize I was losing my hearing in some frequencies due to sensoneural hearing loss.

I got tinnitus after getting covid (which turned into a bad case of long covid that I'm still battling). It started out as maybe a 2 out of 10. Present. Annoying, but not super disrupting. I could play some youtube videos with a creek of water on the lowest sound setting and I couldn't hear it. Then one day a couple of months later it jumped up to a 5 or so. This was disruptive. I had to crank the volume up to about 60% vs 5% before and I had to use a tinnitus flosser matched to my frequency. This was bad. I was losing my mind.

I went back to my audiologist and got a hearing aid to reprogram my brain. I did 90 days of light programming and got reduced to maybe a 3.5. After 90 days she cranked the programming up to more intense and I'm now down to maybe 2.5. Definitely livable. Annoying, present, detectable. But also easy to lose track of it when distracted.

I hope it goes away some day. It's only in my left ear and a hearing test showed I did have partial hearing loss in my left ear at higher frequencies.

One interesting thing in my experience is that just like when you get a new eye glass prescription they ask if A or B is better but here they asked if my tinnitus sounded more like A or B and for every single one I could not answer. It was not like either of them. Not even close. It somehow did not compare.

There is a new approach out there and my audiologist has inquired to be part of the next wave (it's super early still) and I will try it out if she gets it. It's a new technique involving modulation and the tongue.

Forgot to mention, one of my coping strategies was pretending "well I just got home from a concert" cause you kind of have that temporary ear ringing going to bed after a night out at a concert and "pretending" this was no different. It was comforting somehow.

The reality is that the Internet is often useless for this sort of thing. I, like many others, got back problems during the pandemic. In my case science will mostly tell you to do nothing, health care will give you physical therapy, the Internet is full of instant relief stretches, short workout programs and psychological solutions ("don't care" which plays into "do nothing" like science suggests).

I managed to rehabilitate myself mostly by walking for hundreds of hours. That isn't really some trick or secret. That is what health care would eventually tell you to do. It just isn't reflected as much as the easy and the qualified solutions. Now I got tinnitus a few weeks back and it's the same landscape on the Internet. But getting the information isn't really the problem, it is making use of it. It's easy to find a high level of engagement and it's easy to find a high level of knowledge. The challenge is finding both.

I have always been somewhat sensitive to noise, but a lot of people aren't. They have whining fridges, squeaking doors or noise pollution all over the place. They don't really care. You are dismissing symptom reduction a bit. But as far I can tell that is the solution for most. A combination of stress reduction, lifestyle reform and behavioural therapy, potentially with a hearing aid or noise masking. And then it gets manageable enough that they don't care. Maybe you can do that yourself, but possibly you can't and will conclude that it doesn't work.

Of course like I said you shouldn't trust me. I'm going to go find whatever specialist health care can give me without paying too much extra.