Hearing Aids Aggravate Reactive Tinnitus

Hi everyone! This is my first time posting in here but I've certainly spent lots of time reading.

I had a sudden onset of tinnitus on January 7th of this year, no known cause. I do know that I panicked and went to urgent care the morning of the onset and had long/painful ear irrigation, and I fear that made everything 10x worse. I just didn't know any better back then what I would do to go back to that day and change everything...

Anyway, I have one ear with a constant high-pitched eeeee, and the other ear is obnoxious cicadas/wind chimes/chirping. My tinnitus was severely reactive the first 2.5-3 months, causing an entire head hissing at the presence of any sound whatsoever. I was constantly having to run to a quiet room just to get some relief. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed the reactivity & hissing were nearly gone, and just the normal tinnitus sounds remained. I had been wearing an earplug in my reactive ear very regularly, so I'm sure that was part of the healing. I was thrilled.

Now, this past Friday, I got my first pair of Oticon miniRITE hearing aids. I had read so many positive stories about hearing aids, so I was hoping for this wonderful life-changing experience with them. My experience so far has been very discouraging and upsetting. It seems to help (or at least not aggravate) the pure-tone ear, but my previously reactive ear feels like it's right back at square one before I started healing. I tried wearing them for a couple of hours the first night I got them and woke up with my bad ear off the charts, and some of the reactiveness was back. I didn't wear them for the next couple of days, and it seemed to settle down a bit. I tried it back in last night for an hour or so with some very light sound enrichment from the app, and I woke up to my ear going insane again this morning.

Do I just need to give up hope on these hearing aids or give it more time? My audiologist doesn't seem too well-versed in sound enrichment, and I'm not sure what to do. I was starting to feel better, and I fear I ruined it all by trying these hearing aids out.

This thing is a beast.

 

It's difficult to say. If it helps the pure tone side, then it would seem to have some benefit. Maybe try only using it on that side while isolating the bad ear from noise. Maybe just treating the one side will help distract from and calm the relative side.

I use Oticon for sound enrichment myself. It helps a little.

I hope you can get it figured out. I'm sorry to hear you are struggling with this nasty condition.

 

Welcome to the forum. This is a great place for commiseration, support, and ideas on how to calm tinnitus, hyperacusis, and other hearing maladies.

I got hearing aids about eight years ago after my fairly stable 20-year tinnitus became more severe. Initially, they were helpful with hearing the high frequencies, but after about a year of use, I had to discontinue them because they were exacerbating my tinnitus.

You may need an extended break from using your hearing aids (several weeks or more) and try them again. After this, you should be able to determine if discontinuing using them is appropriate.

 

Reactive tinnitus and sound directly into the ears usually don't go together well. If you have reactivity, you need to be more careful.

@Michael Leigh, perhaps you'd like to give your perspective so the original poster hears balanced views?

 

Hi @Melissa S.

Tinnitus can appear suddenly without any known cause, but usually, something brings it on. The most common cause is exposure to loud noise, and typically, it is listening to audio through any type of headphones, often at too high a volume, without realizing it. If you have regularly been using earbuds, AirPods, headsets, noise-canceling, or bone-conduction headphones, your tinnitus could be caused by exposure to loud noise. If you regularly attend clubs or concerts where loud music is played, this can cause tinnitus to develop, too.

Oticon hearing aids or any other type of hearing aids should not be automatically prescribed to treat a person with tinnitus. Unless you have significant hearing loss then your audiologist should not have prescribed you these devices. I will assume you have been seen at ENT and then referred to an audiologist. Then it's my belief ENT would have found no underlying medical cause within your auditory system to be causing the tinnitus.

However, if you have significant hearing loss, hearing aids can help restore your hearing to optimum and treat tinnitus, but this takes time. The correct way to use hearing aids is to introduce them slowly. Perhaps wear them for just 30 minutes at a time, then remove them for the same duration and put them on again. Slowly increase the wearing time.

If your hearing aids are fitted with white noise generators, I suggest that you turn off the white noise for now, give your ears and auditory system time to adjust to the hearing aids, and then slowly introduce the white noise.

From the information in your post, I believe your tinnitus is noise-induced. You may also have hyperacusis. If this is the case, and you don't have significant hearing loss, then hearing aids are the wrong devices to use at this time.

Please click the links below and read my threads: New to Tinnitus, What to Do? Tinnitus, A Personal View.

I wish you well,
Michael

Tinnitus, A Personal View | Tinnitus Talk Support Forum
New to Tinnitus, What to Do? | Tinnitus Talk Support Forum

 

Do not ever touch them unless you have an actual hearing loss below 4 kHz. I have severe reactive tinnitus, and the use of hearing aids to play crickets very quietly for less than an hour set me back for weeks or months, and I perhaps have not fully recovered. Do you have hearing loss anywhere (at least on standard audiogram)?

Most audiologists know nothing about tinnitus. Those who claim they do, they don't and are more dangerous. People like @Michael Leigh (not a real name) who dish advice readily also claim they know things, but they don't. Stay away from their advice.

You instinctively started doing what was right - protecting your ears. There is no clear way to deal with it. It is a combination of protection and gradual exposure but only to sounds that do not cause setbacks. Do not force anything. Try to live a healthy life and keep yourself distracted. Consider supplementing with vitamins B12, D3, and Magnesium. I also take NAD+ (Nicotinamide Riboside) and Resveratrol, but I can't honestly say they do much. It is a crapshoot.

 

Unfortunately, this happened to me, too. I have high-frequency hearing loss, and my tinnitus is very disturbing, and it increases after wearing hearing aids. I don't know what we will do.

 

Simple, don't wear the hearing aids?

 

I have hearing loss and reactive tinnitus. The hearing aid makes the reactive tinnitus worse. It helps my normal tonal tinnitus, but not the static and hissing.

I am very familiar with running to quiet rooms for recovery!

 

I’m in this boat too. I even did a gradual increase in the use of my hearing aids, and it still got worse. I was up for four days and nights before I could sleep from sheer exhaustion. I hate this crap.

It's not that simple when you have hearing loss and reactive tinnitus. Hearing loss is linked to cognitive decline, but sounds make the squealing worse. How do you function in a world like ours? It’s difficult and depressing, and it can impact a person's ability to work after many years in a field that requires hearing to perform.

 

Which is the least preferable: certain increased tinnitus or POSSIBLE cognitive decline later in life?