So I Went to the ENT, What Now?

Hello,
19 years old man.

I have tinnitus for 10 months now. Its lik a mild tinnitus i can hear i in both ears when its silent. When i stick my finger inside my hear i hear like a tone which variates in pitch kinda. And i had some vibrations in my right year as well, now its more like a sound there. If i listen to music for long period of time it gets worse. Caffeine doesnt relate in any way with the tinnitus. The first months the tinnitus was terrible, now i only notice it when its silent.

The STRANGE PART is that after 10 months now i went to the ENT for the first time. And i found out that my hearing is good, so like what do i do now?

 

Hey @Tintintin

Well it sounds like you are coping well.. I would definitely go more easy on headphones and loud parties and maybe carry a pair of earplugs just in case for unexpected situations..

For the rest I guess live your life to the full.. I wish I was 19

Take care !

 

Thanks, but what does this mean?
This is My audiogram, like can a hearing test be faulty?

 

Hey @Tintintin

I am no ENT so I can't really comment on your audiogram.. What I understood by having T myself is that you don't necessarily have a hearing loss when you get T as there are many different causes, some not related to hearing loss...

Maybe someone more acknowledged than me can chip in..

Ciao !

 

I don't have it to hand, but I am 34 and my audiogram shows very similar, if not slightly fewer dips than yours and I too have tinnitus. The most common cause of tinnitus is hearing loss, but it isn't the only one.

Whilst there is a link between tinnitus and hearing loss, the 2 do not always coincide. There are lots of people on here with tinnitus caused by all sorts of different conditions, many of them unrelated to noise induced trauma - me included - and plenty of them will show relatively normal audiograms.

I have been categorised as unusual by the 2 x different ENT consultants I have seen, as mine was apparently an inflammatory response, without infection, that caused it. To put it bluntly, they don't know and hence there is very little useful data as to how it will progress.

Incidentally, the type of hearing test you will most likely have received is pure tone audiometry. This type of hearing test is useful to determine whether or not you would benefit from hearing aids and to tell if severe noise induced trauma is a likely cause.

In practical terms, multiple inner ear hair cells cross over each other in terms of their ability to respond to certain frequencies, so even if some are damaged, your ability to hear certain frequencies could be seemingly unaffected.
If no tinnitus is present, your brain is still receiving signals coming from the damaged hairs, but is ignoring them and hence filtering them out. Where tinnitus is present, your brain continues to pick up on those signals from damaged hairs and respond to them with a ringing or similar.

Even this is not a catch all though, as there are a number of reasons for tinnitus that do not originate from the inner ear...

 

So noice-induced tinnitus can't really be fixed once once the damage is there? is it just the brain who starts ignoring the signals from the damaged hairs, or can hair cells in our inner ear actually be healed like a broken leg after a while?

 

I'm not a doctor, so everything I can offer has been collated from what I have found. Some of it empirical, other parts from clinical studies and medical resources. I have tried to employ some scientific rigor to it, but it is not gospel (funny expression when you think about it).

Hearing cells can be damaged or destroyed. As an example, abuse from music at a gig that is too loud can result in damage and given time, a break from the source of the noise and the right nutrients being delivered to the ear via the capillaries, they can repair. The last part of the sentence is important as lack of blood flow to the inner ear will also destroy hearing over time.

Long term, or serious repeated abuse, without a break, will eventually destroy them as they do not have time to recover and they will die. In this case, with current medical offerings, they cannot be replaced or repaired. As such, this means that this particular hair cell, responsible for part of your hearing is dead and no longer responds to external stimuli - this is not the same as tinnitus though. N.B. That is not to say that research won't catch up.

I have done research work for medical companies in the past (admittedly, surgical, rather than pharmaceutical, but there are analogies in terms of level of testing before release) and those I was involved with over 5 years ago are only now becoming available.

A lot of individuals are seemingly outraged that little is being done to cure hearing loss and tinnitus, but it isn't for a want of trying. There are tens of millions of people globally that have either hearing loss, tinnitus or both and more importantly for drugs companies, the financial means to pay pretty substantial amounts of money to "fix" it. If someone told me tomorrow that my tinnitus would be gone for life but it would cost £1000+ a year for a seemingly simple drug, I would find the money and I suspect many other people on this forum would as well. For a pharmaceutical company, it would be a gold mine. I suspect the annual revenues would be in the trillions.

Auris Medical are just one company working on a fix for this at the moment, but it isn't yet ready and I suspect the recent failures of the Bial drug trial in France could slow down some more experimental drugs from being released, but who knows, it could be appearing within the next year or two.

As far as is tinnitus is concerned though, there is nothing to say that tinnitus won't go on its own. It sounds odd, but the brain has the capacity to just forget that it was tuning into these damaged signals and ignore them completely. I understand that it does happen to some people, but I could not offer any meaningful data as to how often this occurs.

 

I appericate your answer. My tinnitus is most likely caused by listenting to loud music with headphones over a long period of time. I find it interesting that netrients being delivered to the ear via the capillaries can be repaired (i have no idea what that means, just took the words out of your mouth lol) , but do you know how long it can take if thats the case? is it common to have tinnitus for months before it goes away? I have no significant hearing loss, and this my first long-term tinnits warning. I don't want to sound selfish, but I hate being here. I want this to be gone. Based on your information and experience, what do you think my chances are of it going away (if there is any...)? i have never attented any loud concerts or gigs, just been listenting to loud music with my headphones since i buyed them (in late october). I find it very strange that my tinnitus did not occur right after being exposed to loud music, but out of the blue, in the middle of the night. is this scenario normal with noice-induced tinnitus? Thank you for your answer.

 

I guess if there is one thing I have come to realise about tinnitus, is that there is no "normal". Everyone seems to have different tones, pitches, volumes, etc. I have seen improvements in my tinnitus, but they are glacially slow. I have started to work on the basis of 2 month blocks, as I can definitely recognise improvements over that length of time. Before, I was going by weeks and each week seemed to have no improvement and that was getting me down. I know it has, on average become quieter, as things that I had forgotten that I could hear are now becoming audible again. The hard drive spinning in my TV recorder is now audible to me again when sitting on the sofa. The tick in my watch by the bed at night can now be heard. These are all things that my brain simply did not hear for months as the tinnitus was drowning them out.

Like so many others, I have absolutely no idea where this concludes, but I have only been off the inflammatory and hence tinnitus inducing drug for 7 1/2 months and I was on it for around 2 years before that and it took a year to appear, so I think as a minimum, I need to give it a year and even then, who knows how it was building in my system, so I don't think 2 years would be a totally unreasonable length of time to wait, but it's going to be a long 2 years.

Just for your information, it is all too easy to kick yourself over these things and be filled with regret, but it doesn't help. I KNEW there was something wrong within 2 months of starting the drug, as I developed appalling allergies, skin sores etc. I was passed around different medical professionals, all of whom didn't have a clue what was wrong and even when I asked could it be the drug you have given me, I was told repeatedly that it was impossible. In the end, I took myself off of it and only since then have I seen improvements. I just wish I had trusted my own instincts before the tinnitus started, as all the other symptoms have now cleared up, but you trust these people, as they are supposed to be the experts.