Should the Medical Community Make a Standardized Procedure for Determining the Cause of Tinnitus?

What is your opinion of this?

The medical community should create a standardized set of questions/tests that all doctors should use to determine potential causes of tinnitus. They would ask a set of standardized questions and do tests for all different potential types of causes, and this would be the same for every person with tinnitus. They can explore all different kinds of potential causes, from injury to diet to medications to emotional states to medical disorders to recent illnesses to hearing loss, etc. There are so many factors and causes; Once the medical community verifies more causes of tinnitus (because many factors and potential causes are not scientifically validated or proven), I think they should then create a standardized set of questions and tests/procedures that should be taken that explore all aspects of the person's life and all potential causes of tinnitus. We need them to make a special check list of questions and tests. Of course, if some causes can obviously and definitively be ruled out, then they would not be need to be investigated any further (why waste money on a test when it was entirely ruled out before).

Hell, even if some of these causes are not "scientifically validated or proven" it would still be good to have some sort of standardized situation going for inquiries about "non-scientifically validated" causes of tinnitus. Only because even now doctors will allude to treatments or causes that are not scientifically validated (such as mine, which gave me a medication that had worked with only one of his patients and has no scientific validation. But it worked for one person so he recommended it).

I think the future of tinnitus is everyone getting the same exact kind of investigation done about them by the doctors (with some of these investigations varying only if a certain cause can definitely be ruled out entirely. Why make people waste money on unnecessary tests?)

 

You mean something like a diagnostic flowchart?

 

That is a beautiful flow chart! My ENT should see this because he had not mentioned anything like it... I wish more ENTs would use stuff like that (all 3 of the ones that I have seen did not mention it)