A Question for the Cured People (If They Are Still Around)

When did you realise your Tinnitus was gone?

Did you wake up one day to silence or did it eventually fade till it was nothing?

Just curious as to what to expect if im one of the lucky ones.

 

@Tim Hogan
anyone legitimately "cured" is not on this site. Most specialists indicate that the path to either remission or habituation is not linear, rather it is a roller coaster of symptom intensity that can last anywhere for a few days to a few years.

 

There are a few cases of remission in the success stories!

 

They are most likely not here anymore. I would also classify habituation as cured.

 

I wouldn't.

If I habituate it's going to increase my quality of life, no doubt about it. But if I listen to music, I won't enjoy it fully because it isn't going to sound right. I may not have a nasty reaction to it (thanks to habituation), but I'll realize that what I'm hearing is not right nonetheless.

If I was cured, I'd be enjoying the music.

Habituation may be a fantastic milestone, but it is not a cure.

 

^ good point regarding listening to music. I do wonder however, if 100% habituation means that the brain 'corrects' the sensation of music...

 

I don't think so. If the brain was to correct its perception of sound such that it matches what is sent through the ear canal, then for all practical purposes, you are cured, as by definition your brain hears what is sent to the ear drum.

Habituation, as I understand it, is different: you still hear the T. You just don't react negatively about it anymore.

 

When I was ok and didn't think about T I stopped coming to this forum (sorry about that), people generally move on with their lives and don't come back, that's why there are not many success stories and a lot of sad and dark posts.
When I started to feel better about my T I found myself not paying attention to it for hours, after a few weeks of that happening it's volume started to drop and got to a point of 0.5/10, only noticing at complete silence. Now I had a relapse last month and trying slowly to get to that point again, hope to get there soon. Best wishes

 

Im not cured, far from it, but i am in a healthy relationship of mutual tolerance with my tinnitus at the moment. First 6 months were hell, with some very dark times. It's not something that happens over night but takes months to years with many setbacks.

 

Habituation, means for the most part being able to move on with most of your life. It doesn't promise anything as a principle. Its all in how we define it for our own purposes I guess.

 

In my experience, you don't hear your T unless you start to search and listen to it. Majjor difference.

 

How is your hearing? If you have dead hearing gaps with tinnitus replacing exterior sounds, good luck with not hearing T unless you listen for it.

 

I think you are possibly talking about physiological tinnitus, which everyone has. If not, you are talking about a tinnitus intensity level that can be set aside relatively easily. Many of us don't have that. For many of us, the sound in our heads is something you would instinctively move away from, were it an externally generated sound.

 

Consider yourself lucky.

 

The chances of finding a cured person on a tinnitus forum are about as high as finding a vindicated person on death row.

Actually... it sometimes feels a bit like death row here...

 

Sometimes vindication arrives a bit late for some.

 

Forgot to add. Consistency. If your tinnitus is relatively unchanging then habituation is more likely for you because you have the familiarity advantage. When your tinnitus chops and changes with intensity, sound variety, hyperacusis sometimes there sometimes not, and those various middle-ear symptoms (the fullness, the spasmodic pains etc..) then habituation just isn't going to happen. Its like being expected to "habituate" to being hunted by zombies.

 

For someone with a mere 6 posts on this forum, you seem to know a lot about T