Guys, It's VERY Possible That a Cure Is Right in Front of Us...

Hey everyone,

My name is Eric and I am 24. For months I had what I (and 2 doctors) believe was noise induced tinnitus, as I played in a very active rock band for a year prior. It woke me up suddenly one day, and did not subside. It drove me to complete and utter ruin, and I spent a large portion of several months reading online testimonies of people who had theirs for years, which naturally added fuel to the fire of my grief. I ruminated on it constantly, read dozens of theories on how to fix it, and saw 2 doctors from a rather prestigious and high ranking healthcare system. Each time I left the appointment with a mere packet labelled "tinnitus", and a profound conviction that they knew nothing about what they were talking about. They said to get reacclimated with the sounds of the world, and that maybe it would go away, and maybe it wouldn't.

The "solutions" I stumbled upon online included "retraining therapy", "masking", and all the other half-baked crap that I'm sure you people are all too familiar with. Being the stubborn person that I am, none of this sufficed. "Learning to live with it" was not something that I was interested in in the slightest. I soon concluded that conventional clinical doctors don't know anything about the ears, in spite of what they tell you. So I figured I would learn myself.

I began scouring clinical research studies on pubmed every night and tried to cobble together some type of real knowledge. As it turns out, animal studies are typically several decades ahead of clinical practice.

Prevailing conventional medicine says the mammalian auditory system DOES NOT regenerate. There was, however, research that had shown that birds and other animals do. There was also a Harvard study which found that drug induced inhibition of the Notch signaling pathway was able to regenerate hair cells in an adult mouse post noise overexposure. There were also studies in which soldiers who were exposed to acoustic trauma in Iraq were treated with antioxidants like Coenzyme Q10 and thus the damage was mitigated. In addition, there was a study which found curcumin, a compound found in turmeric, inhibited Notch signaling...

Now already, I could see that "conventional medical ideology" was a bit questionable. I had no biochemical background before this, but I absolutely had a burning desire to fix the problem at the root of the cause, which was quite likely the auditory cells. Loud noise exposure leads to oxidation of these cells, which kills them if extreme enough, which may then cause the eternal ringing that we all know and love.

Eventually I stumbled upon a TED talk by a doctor named Terry Wahls. This was a woman who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2001 and entered the progressive stage a bit later. For those who are not familiar, MS is categorized as an incurable autoimmune disease, which leads to an alleged irreversible decline of the central nervous system. Long story short, she was at one point using a wheelchair succumbing to an “incurable” disease of the central nervous system, but now bikes marathons.


But here’s the clincher- prevailing medicine also states that the central nervous system DOES NOT regenerate….

Dr. Wahls was able to not only stop the degradation of neurons of the central nervous system, but reverse it significantly. She was able to do this through drastic overhaul of her diet in favor of one that was essentially paleo. Think LOTS of fruits and vegetables, fish, fats in their natural form, no sugar, etc.

Assuming her account is true (and there is sufficient reason to believe it is), this necessarily tells us that there ARE in fact repair mechanisms within the body that can repair the central nervous system, and the way to tap into them is by eating what we as homo sapiens are supposed to eat, and not the vitamin deprived crap that we all eat today. It actually makes perfect sense when you think about it.


I applied these principles to my own case. I stopped drinking alcohol, stopped eating sugar, and went all in with a ton of greens, vegetables, salmon, fatty acids, etc. Today I have no tinnitus. I haven’t “habituated”, it’s just gone.

Was it coincidence? I’m not sure anyone can argue either way with 100% certainty. My tinnitus was relatively mild, but it was nonetheless persistent and grief inducing. I had it for 4.5 months, and shortly after adopting the dietary change, it faded precipitously and ceased. If it was a coincidence, it sure as hell didn’t seem like one.


As I understand it, eating paleo foods (with an emphasis on a variety of colors and species of vegetation) is enough to alter our gut flora enough to activate metabolic pathways and gene expression that are otherwise silenced in the absence of the materials needed. My case for this repairing the auditory system is speculative, but bear in mind how different our modern diets are from our ancestors, and the fact that we evolved for hundreds of thousands of years on THAT stuff, not the corporate atrocities we buy in grocery stores today engineered solely with profit in mind.

Meanwhile, keep in mind that pharmaceutical companies dictate the curriculum of what doctors learn in med school. This is partially why doctors are so quick to write a prescription for some mysterious drug concoction that typically only ever yields so-so results, all the while draining your bank account as you wait in vain for the solution on the horizon that is perpetually out of reach. The doctor doesn’t know any better.


The answer is nutrition, ladies and gentlemen. I’d bet money on it.

I didn't include links for anything that I mentioned, but the TED talk and the pubmed articles should be easy enough to find with a google search or two.

 

Well said.

I radically altered my diet into a healthy one several years ago after doing nutrition research, and abandoning the "standard American diet" I was raised on. Lost significant weight (50 pounds, down to a normal BMI); altered my metabolic "fires" sufficiently such that I was actually able to eat MORE calories after the weight loss, just to maintain my new lower weight; major changes in energy, skin, disease resistance, etc.

Then a few years ago, I slipped up (due to significant grief in my life - just fell into emotional comfort eating) and the year before I got tinnitus, I was eating sooooo many white carbs, sugars, etc. and virtually no vegetables.

Tinnitus kicked THAT out again. I've been back to much healthier eating. Tinnitus still there, but I am on a plan where I do expect it to go, assisted by diet, tai chi, and other modes.

You made a great post. Thanks.

 

I also want to add that I think alcohol interfered with tinnitus in a negative way. Often times I would wake up after a night of drinking and have the ringing more pronounced for a few days. This is also consistent with the literature, as alcohol is a known inflammatory, and CLEARLY wreaks havoc on your gut, as anyone who has taken a dump a night after drinking can attest to. It also depletes your body of nutrients, and you know it must affect the inner ear because it makes you dizzy with enough consumption. I saw this as sufficient reason to cut out alcohol entirely before starting my dietary change. Again, all speculative but not unfounded.

 

@Eric S you make a mockery of a complex neurological symptom if you think any form of diet can cure us.

 

I make a mockery of nothing. "Neurology" is based on the study of "neurons", the very cells that a diet can promote the health and proliferation of, and the human body is more complex than you or I can possibly imagine. "Neurological" is still very much physical. Many people would consider depression a neurological problem, but it's often due to a shortage or misappropriation of serotonin, as a result of a lack of vitamin D. Thus, something physical, like a lack of Vitamin D from the sun can result in something neurological in nature. There's no mental and physical. It's all physical.

 

well... if some food can make T worst... wouldnt some others relief tinnitus?

 

I Think the most imporant here, is that he is tinnitus free after 4.5 months
congratulations, enjoy the silence eric

 

I agree with what you've said Eric, we are what we eat, but, unfortunately, the only way today, to ensure that the food we eat is really healthy, is to grow it all ourselves, preferably on virgin organic soil with organically produced seed.

Over production of food during the war left UK soil virtually toxic due to agricultural practices enforced by lack of space.

A huge percentage of our 'fresh' food is imported & stored. During the time it takes to get from being picked to being on our supermarket shelves many essential vitamins and minerals are lost.

Fruit should be eaten after being ripened by the sun, not after being stored and then 'forced' to ripen. The difference between an orange picked from a tree in Cyprus (where I once lived) and one from a UK supermarket shelf is immense - they could easily be two different species. Avocados in New Zealand bear no resemblance in taste to those we eat here.

I'd be here all day if I was to start on the dangers of fish farms... imported prawns and chemicals injected into livestock & what has happened due to the society in which we live wanting cheaper and cheaper food.

One school of thought is that we've come so far down the wrong path, making our 'fresh' food so unhealthy, that 'chemically derived' could be better for us. And that's really scary.

 

The term"Spontaneous Remission"comes to mind.

Seriously though as much as I appreciate your thoughts on the matter explain one thing to me,if the body can indeed repair itself to this degree including all the notch signalling you speak of then find me somebody with a measurable hearing loss and get them to follow your regime and see if their hearing improves at all,I can quarantee it won't.

 

@click While I agree with you that yes, corporate agricultural practices have led to even bastardized versions of fruits and vegetables devoid of their former nutritional content, we also have some profound advantages that we can use to take matters into our own hands. For example, we have access to a pretty wide variety of fruits and vegetables, as well as to the internet, which could teach us how to go about growing our own stuff should we decide to.

Interestingly enough, during World War II here in America, people were required to ration store bought foods and meat because much of it needed to go to the other Allied forces, who were starving due to damaged or unattended farmlands as a result of war. During this time, it was encouraged by the US government that people grow their own food in their gardens. As a result, disease declined markedly (Keep in mind this was before the US congress was in bed with big businesses, so they actually acted in the interest of the people as opposed to corporate profit some times).

This increase in health of the population was originally thought to be due to the removal of meat, but this idea has since been discredited. Instead, they think it was due to the decrease in sugar (which was also rationed) and the increase in homemade fruits and veggies.

 

@bill 112 Bill, it is easy to understand your lack of faith given what we are told time and time again, but as for the "spontaneous remission" that is known to occur, nobody has ever even given us a detailed explanation on a cellular level as to why that occurs. Why do some people's tinnituses go away after a while, while others do not? For one thing, we all have a different set of gene polymorphisms, so maybe they would stay and go regardless, but keep in mind another thing that is different from person to person: our diet. To further complicate the matter, our polymorphisms interact with our diets.

The whole point of me including the story of the woman who reversed her multiple sclerosis is to show just how capable we are of rejuvenation, in spite of what conventional healthcare would have us believe. They do not understand how disease works, but keep us drug addled while they fumble around for an answer in the mean time. And you might say, well maybe she had a "spontaneous remission" too, but she was already into the progressive stage of the disease and had declined significantly over the course of years. She then changed her diet and got out of the wheelchair shortly thereafter. Does that sound like a spontaneous remission to you?

As for your suggestion that I find a hearing impaired person and force them to change their diet, I have neither the time nor means to do such a thing, but I also don't think it is such a crazy thing to imagine happening. It is known that carotenoids can restore the macula of the eye, and stave off what is known as macular degeneration. Why wouldn't another compound or vitamin be active in the auditory system?

Whatever it is, remember that the person who wants to be healed probably needs to dig themselves out of a nutritional deficit before healing would hypothetically occur. This means sustained effort in dietary change. Damage doesn't happen overnight, and healing doesn't either. Also, this deficit gets larger as we age, and I am only 24, so my body probably has an edge over someone who is 85 and wants to heal something.

 

@Eric S so did I uderstand that right. You had T for 4,5 months. At the 4 months mark you changed your diet into paleo diet and niw you are T free?

 

I don't think diet has a big role - age has.

The fact is that you are only 24 your body can heal much better and also your accumulative previous noise exposure was quite short - 1 year.

So yes the body can heal if the damage is recent and not decades of repeated loud noise exposure on already older people

But yes eating healthy is important - although this does not mean that bad diets or junk food lovers get tinnitus either

 

4-5 months of onset is when T usually starts to go away on its own, i.e. fade away (proven)...but I certainly understand that eating healthy will facilitate any healing if it were to occur spontaneously.

 

@Zora Approximately, yes. But I am not as knowledgeable as some experts on the exact mechanisms of each and every food that I had, and in fact, much of the knowledge of compounds found in plants and their benefits have yet to be discovered (though the research is in progress if you look around). So to ensure maximal benefit, I included a wide range of raw vegetables and fruits in large quantities, fish, some red meat, and avoided sugars at all costs, as well as alcohol once I saw that it had some sort of effect. Beyond this I would rather not go into the details of my diet because I do not want people to think that I have some sort of agenda or sales pitch here. I don't.

@Bobby B If you have presumably had longer exposure time than I, then it is safe to assume that yes, you probably have more damage. But you also mentioned age, and the process of aging is more complicated than you are giving it credit. What is aging exactly, on a cellular level? There are many contributors to what we call “age”, but by and large it is characterized by the breaking down of your DNA over time. Part of it is due do oxidative stress from your metabolism which yes, is a by-product of keeping you alive.

BUT- this unavoidable stress from your day to day metabolism is of far less significance than we tend to give it. A great deal of this stress on your DNA comes from other sources which you encounter throughout your life, such as radiation, inflammation, carcinogens, and…. what you eat ( or don’t eat). This is why some people look way older than their chronological age and some look way younger. They were the ones that were less or better able to preserve the integrity of their DNA, respectively.


There is also a study which shows that a lack of folic acid in your diet has the same effect on your DNA as being radiated. You know where folic acid comes from? Greens.


That being said, the longer you have been alive, the more likely you are to have a deficit in vitamins and minerals (and folic acid), just by nature of you having had more time to eat crap. Even people that are on the healthier end of the spectrum likely aren’t eating close to the amount that our hunter gatherer bodies have grown accustomed to for hundreds of thousands of years.


So @Bobby B , you might have a bigger hole to dig out of, and honestly I am in no position to guarantee anything to you, but the mechanism should be the same for you and I. Again, we’re all different, and I do not have all the answers. But what do you have to lose anyway? A few inches off your waist?

 

I ate a healthy diet all my life, because I was into various sporting activities and working out. I limited carbs in favor of fresh veggies, lean poultry and fish. I never used salt and rarely ate sugars. I kept my inner machine clean. I did enjoy a glass or two of red wine but never abused it.

However, I acquired tinnitus and severe hearing loss in one ear. My other ear is still pretty good. So apparently my diet had nothing to do with it at all. I blame some of my condition on genetics (my entire family has T) and overexposure to music and power tools.

I see people everyday, fat, lethargic, eating junk food and hear fine without tinnitus. I've known many older people, who had great hearing and no tinnitus and ate whatever they wanted, all their lives.

So, you may think diet can cure tinnitus, but as of today, there is no clinical proof that diet can. Not to say, a healthy diet isn't a good way to eat and maintain good overall health.

After only 4 and half months with T, you can't claim, you have found the solution, to a problem that has existed for over 5,000 years. I don't buy it.

 

@Sailboardman - Like I said before, EVEN people that are widely viewed as having a healthy diet by modern standards are unlikely to come close to what our ancestors had. Forget the FDA, they don’t know a damn thing. Just a few years ago they said we were supposed to be eating more bread than anything else…

You say you ate healthy- did you eat 200 different species of fruits and vegetables in the past year? The answer is no, it’s doubtful that anyone did. And I doubt anyone has for a long time (at least in the western world). On top of that, even the soil that we use to grow stuff now is of inferior quality. Now suppose you accrued a deficit over many years.

Take the example of sailors getting scurvy. There was a time when sailors kept becoming ill and nobody knew why. Eventually they had enough sense to give them citrus fruits to ameliorate what turned out to be a vitamin c deficiency. You think it took a sailor one trip to develop a deficiency in vitamin c? Probably not. So why can’t this principle of deprivation over time apply to the body differently and with different time intervals?

You say that many people in your family have tinnitus, which yes would probably indicate some sort of genetic predisposition. But you know what else? There are known polymorphisms that make certain people require more of a certain vitamin for a normal effect because their bodies, for one reason or another, do not absorb it as well as others. This is likely due to the evolutionary environment that a given population resided in, in which that particular vitamin was abundant, so as to de-prioritize the inhabitants’ bodies absorption of it. This is in published research.

As for your point about fat people, there was not a single instance in this thread where I said eating unhealthy would give a person tinnitus without inner ear damage occurring. I merely insinuated that the less than optimal diet which we all eat probably lends itself to a less resilient repair system.

Think of it like this - If you don’t get cut, you are not going to bleed, no matter how fat you are (ebola virus and menstruation dont count). A cut is the result of a type of damage. Tinnitus is the result of a type of damage (or so there is good reason to believe).

Your point about knowing older people without tinnitus who didn’t pay attention to their diet is irrelevant for a number of reasons (see above). They could be predisposed genetically to resilience, they could have had insufficient oxidative damage to cause it, they could have stillbeen getting enough of whatever is required to run the repair mechanisms in spite of their particular diet’s apparent inefficacy, etc.

If you really wanted to poke holes in this theory, then someone would have to take a group of very healthy people and a group of fat people, both the same age etc. and blast the hell out of their ears with noise and record who got tinnitus. If this were the case, I would be willing to bet that the unhealthy people would be far more prone on average. Then you would have to do the same thing with old and young people. Obviously ethical issues run amok in this hypothetical trial, but again my money would be on the older people developing a higher incidence of tinnitus. So then it becomes a matter of why? My answer would be the presence of a repair mechanism dependent, like any other mechanism in the world, on the fuel it receives.

I’m not saying I have all the answers, I’m saying there is something very significant in terms your diet’s connection to your body’s ability to repair itself, and this isn’t some unfounded suspicion; this is based on some of the latest research there is. Researchers are finding out more and more by the day.

 

Why is the diet of our ancestors relevant in any way?
Were they in perfect health or were they impervious to neurological disorders?

Anyway, after I got tinnitus, for about one year, I only ate tomatoes, olives, lettuce, bananas, oranges, apples, pears, grapes, cabbage, carrots, lots of olive oil and lemons, lots of sesame paste. Drove my wife crazy. Pretty much everything bought fresh from local daily markets as I live in Greece, where fresh is pretty much all you can get.
Guess what, two years on, still T.

I'd take that bet.
Thing is, your theory is full of holes already, as its just that: a theory. There is no established study where tinnitus "prefers" the fat vs. the thin.

 

@undecided The diet of our ancestors is INCREDIBLY relevant to how our bodies function today. I would argue that in many ways, yes their health was far better than ours, but this is impossible to prove entirely. Obviously we benefit from many technological advantages, like vaccines etc., but infections and outlying instances aside, in terms of overall health I would bet they were better off physically, provided that they were living in a resource rich environment at the time.

You forgot the fats, which are incredibly important for maintenance of the central nervous system. You need lots of fish as well.

Guys, I don't really want to argue with people on a case by case basis, but know that I am not crazy. I didn't just make stuff up. Just do us both a favor - watch the TED talk with Terry Wahls and while watching, keep in mind that the auditory system is part of the central nervous system, which is the focal point of the presentation on MS.

 

Eric, I think as you point out diet is important. Deficiencies in vitamins could play a role in giving someone T, and I like your idea of eating healthy. I don't think your diet is going to reverse anyone's hearing loss though and I don't think its going to get rid of anyone's T unless it was a result of the bad diet from either bad blood flow, vitamin deficiency, etc etc. For what its worth, I have spent the past month eating much healthier than normal, exercising more, but I have had trouble sleeping and my T is worst right now. I don't think any of the above mentioned helped, but I know the lack of sleep is what is messing me up right now.
I am really happy for you though and I appreciate your posts. Right now all we have are theories on what happened to us and how we can get better, so every bit of information helps in my opinion. T is a very complex condition and there is no "one size fits all" approach. This information could help someone that had symptoms similar to yours.

 

@Eric S

I am very vested in the idea that diet can help some specific kinds of tinnitus (like mine!!). However, I do not believe that any diet will be able to repair destroyed hair cells, and the influence of diet on cases with cochlear damage should be small.
Going back to my case, I think that my T comes from a microbial imbalance with a focal point in my left middle ear that was created from a very rich sugar/carbs diet to start with. It took me a long time to figure out that my problem could be something else that is not just the usual hearing loss cause. I have been on no sugar/no carbs, probiotics and antifungals for about a year, and only now I am starting to get clear signs of improvement. Everybody is different, but these problems can take a very long time to fix. One has to note that these microbes (microbiome) are in symbiosis with us, and they usually do not produce any damage. My point is that one has to eliminate the magical thinking of diet being a cure if there is not a possible root cause to be fixed. In my case, I don't think that diet by itself will solve it. I am not out of the woods yet, and I do not want to speculate any further until I really get cured by the treatment that I am following.

https://www.tinnitustalk.com/thread...er-taking-anti-fungal-drug.11142/#post-182044

 

Just a quick question

What about drug induced tinnitus?

 

I am just adding a couple of links somewhat related to the discussion:

http://neurosciencenews.com/gut-bacteria-multiple-sclerosis-4183/

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/m...erage&region=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article&_r=0

 

Never confuse correlation with causation. I think Eric's story is interesting, but I believe many cases of tinnitus resolve on their own within several months no matter what the person does. I'd find it a lot more suggestive if an older person who'd had tinnitus for years would experience a similar improvement.

Having said that, Dr. Wahls' experience with diet and MS is worth taking a look at (although I'd read somewhere that she also underwent chemo or something to help re-boot her immune system, so her experience can't be completely explained by a change in diet). The Wahls diet was designed to rebuild the myelin sheaths around the nerves since MS damages them, thus preventing the nerves from transmitting signals properly. With tinnitus it appears that our hyperactive nerves are transmitting way too many unwanted signals that aren't being filtered out - a different disease process - so any diet would have to address the cause(s) of this and counteract them.

 

Don't get me wrong,I do believe the body has the capacity to heal it's self to some degree of not near fully but a diet is not the answer for this by any means.I was young when I got T and still am but yet I have only gotten worse and by noise and noise only,here's a recap for you

-Tinnitus at 18 years old,10 months later T fully resolved,no diet nothing just carried in as I always did.

-At 19 T came back with new tone after a noisy night out,4 months later the tone fully resolved and my usual hissing reduced by 90%.Again no diet nothing just time and patience.

-At 21 some asshole exposed me to a high frequency sound resulting in H and new level T.After 1 year H reduced by 50% along with 70% reduction in T.Another year later and H had reduced by 80% and T had reduced by 85%.Again no treatment no special diets just time and commitment.

-At 24 my current age my T and H got suddenly 10 times worse,current level is H 9/10 and T at 5/10 with no improvement so far,maybe very little at best.

So there you are,I experienced significant improvements from doing absolutely nothing whatsoever only protecting my hearing and giving it time.In the end it didn't matter as faith had other plans for me but from direct experience what you went through isn't anything special or extraordinary.Its a fairly common occurrence that should be credited to the body and not a diet.Sure the diet probably helped somehow but it in itself is not the direct cause for your remission.

Enjoy the silence.

 

So far Eric, going by the responses in this discussion your premise is holding up fairly well. I still think youth and short term exposure (compared with a lot of us) have also been on your team, but your message is no doubt universal. Cure? Treatment? remission? reduction in symptoms? For most of us, trying what you suggest is possible without too much cost or difficulty, and it brings other positives. Best of all, you aren't selling a product so I trust your sincerity already.

 

@PaulBe Thank you Paul! You have restored my faith in mankind. It's funny, you always hear about ancient "herbal remedies" for whatever kind of ailment, and as it turns out its not total BS after all. The most recent science is beginning to more or less confirm it.

@Kste Adams I understand that people are skeptical of this idea, and a little skepticism is always healthy. But people need to be looking deeper into the microscope for what is happening exactly. You mentioned that sometimes cases resolve spontaneously, but nobody has been able to explain why this is. Clearly it is some type of mechanism at play. Otherwise why would it happen at all, to anyone, ever? And yes Dr. Wahls' instance with MS had to do with myelin sheaths deteriorating, but if you look deeper, you'd have to ask "Well how did the myelin sheaths get repaired?" It's not like she just ate the fat and it magically transported from her stomach to her brain. The work had to be performed by some type of helper. And it did. The helpers are called "oligodendrocytes". These are glial cells, which took the raw materials and synthesized the much needed myelin sheaths. The glial cells knew what to do once they had the materials to do the job. So why wouldn't there be some type of helper cell for the inner ear, that, much like oligodendrocytes, performs repair work once the required materials are acquired?

 

By age I mean a much longer repeated noise exposure that comes with it - not age itself

 

@Bobby B I'm not sure, you might be right, but you might be wrong. If you look at Terry Wahls, that was a moderately advanced stage of multiple sclerosis, but she made continued effort and she improved dramatically over time, and still is to this day. If this model is any indicator, it would mean that there is still hope for people like you, it would just take longer. And we don't know exactly what that material needed to perform repairs may be, which makes it a bit of a shot in the dark. But the evidence seems to add up, and a shot in the dark is better than no shot at all. I sincerely want you to get better, man. Tinnitus sucked. No "professionals" were any help, and the so called solutions you find online like tonal remapping or masking or whatever the hell were borderline insulting. Nobody should have to go through that. I sincerely feel for you, which is why I posted this in the first place. I feel that it's at least a logical shot at TRULY fixing the problem, and I would feel guilty if I didn't at least try to share it.

 

Guys. What the heck are you eating over there in the US that is so bad? Are all of you in the drive-thru line at MC Donalds? Here in Norway we still eat oldfashioned food that we make from scratch. Potatoes, carrots, sauce, cod, herring, monkfish, trout, pork, cow, chicken etc. We also eat alot of oat. I eat oat for breakfast every morning. Always did.

We also eat a good amount of fruit. The selection may not be that good here, as we live pretty far north, but we have all the basic ones. Like apples, bananas, pears, oranges, mangos etc etc...