Can Masking Tinnitus Prevent Tinnitus from Recovering on Its Own?

We all know about tinnitus maskers, and we know that noise exposure frequently triggers tinnitus. We know about the ringing (or similar) that immediately follows such noise exposure. Often the ringing will abate, but sometimes it does not. For me, it reduced a consistent threshold level and fluctuates up or down from there. We know that that subsequent loud noise can cause a spike in the tinnitus severity.

Is it possible that the moderate level masking sounds we use for relief are preventing the tinnitus from recovering on its own? Or, to put it another way, could tinnitus always be the result of very recent trauma (as it often is in the first instance) even if it is the unintended result of masking?

In cases where I (stupidly) caused my tinnitus to flare up, the sound involved was always some repetitive, mechanical noise. This kind of sound was similar to white noise type typical of masking sounds. I know this is unbelievably optimistic, but could the masking itself (and being exposed to moderate noise in general) be preventing the physical trauma underlying tinnitus from healing on its own?

I wear hearing aids and program them myself. One thing I just changed is to cut back on the maximum power output (MPO) of the hearing aids. The result sounds odd. For instance, I can hear a whisper perfectly but a cough sounds muffled. I've also started putting in ear plugs whenever there is machine like noise in my environment. And, unrelated, I've stopped using my active noise cancellation headphones after reading that some people with tinnitus ascribe their trouble to those devices.

I had "tennis elbow" (un-diagnosed) for 2 years. Every time I bumped a certain spot on my elbow, I got a sharp pain. Only after getting some good advice and wearing a special protective strap (for about 3 weeks) did it heal. No more tennis elbow. Could tinnitus be the same? That is, could it be that we're just not giving it the rest it needs?

 

When my tinnitus went away the first time I would mask it 95% of the day, basically anytime I could. It still went away.

 

Wish I'd known about masking/residual inhibition when I first got tinnitus. I was too anxious to do any research and now here I am fucked as ever.

 

One study I saw concluded that exposure to basically constant low volume white nose following an acoustic trauma, made people less likely to develop tinnitus in the first place.