Surprised by How Many People Have Tinnitus

My T seems to be only audible now in only very quiet environments. I drive myself crazy by checking constantly and they all say that makes it louder (but it's hard to me not to as I'm anxious).

I recently found out my mom and husband have the same thing.

I wonder how many of us are "calling" it upon us by checking. Maybe that is a big part of the problem. Well that is what my therapist says anyway. As well as other doctors.

 

Yes, but I really doubt if we can call theirs as tinnitus. I think we must have it louder than anyone around us has it that it led us to end being a sufferer. But of course everyone is different. Btw my girlfriend and a friend of mine also have it but they say they only hear it when they push themselves to hear it. I don't count something like this as tinnitus.

 

I know and I'm sorry. I don't want to minimize it for anyone who has severe T. I wonder if it's more of the case for people who have it mild.

 

Always better not to listen out for tinnitus.
Our brain is very clever and will filter out sounds and over time you will loose the attention to listen for it.
You will go minutes to hours and even days when your busy or focused on other things and that time will build up to habituation and for some people go on to lead a normal life prior to tinnitus.....lots of love glynis

 

what do you call it?

 

Tiny-tus.

 

I really don't have it that loud now. I think the extreme anxiety behind it made it so much worse. Don't get me wrong I am still trying to get through all of this and dealing with the anxiety every single day. Here is what I think happened for me personally: I had an ear infection and had loud T. I could hear it outside and in stores etc. I've had that before with an ear infection but this was the first time I really googled it and found that it could be incurable and then I freaked completely out and constantly listened for it. Which of course they say to not do that but silly me I couldn't stop.

It has gotten lower and lower and lower but because I am so hyper aware of it now I think it was just not getting better. It is enough to drive someone crazy.

Again this is only for people with mild T not severe T

 

wow marie
you just described me. same thing. ear infection. much better but obsessing over it.

 

Marie, did the hearing aids help u?

 

Yes but one of the audiologists I went to said not to use them as they will hinder my habituation. I think maybe he was meaning that after the habituation time period if I still needed them that would be different.

 

I've been surprised by the number of people I talk to who say they have tinnitus.

When they say "I can only hear it in a quiet room", my first instinct used to be to want to to grab them by the throat and say "No you don't have f***ing tinnitus, you have no idea what it is to go through what I go through!".

But then when I think back, for years that what I had, although I scarcely gave it a second thought. When I used to get random tones popping in and out of my head, I never gave that much thought either. When I went to concerts and played in loud bands for years, and started using earplugs because I realised the after-effects were taking longer to wear off.

Now if someone tells me they have tinnitus, I try and find out how much at-risk they may be, and hopefully give them some focussed advice on how they can avoid going down the road we've all been travelling.

 

That's better than "Tin-EYE-tus"

 

it's all the rage

 

Rather than suggesting that others don't have tinnitus because it isn't loud enough, I wonder if it would be more productive to devise a new term - a more medically important term - to refer to those of us with tinnitus that reaches a more serious level. It seems to me that the problem isn't that others "don't have it", but rather that there's currently only one term to refer to those of us with a) temporary tinnitus that goes away in seconds/minutes/hours, b) low level tinnitus that they hardly even realize is there, and c) high level, problematic tinnitus. These are clearly not all the same thing, and referring to them as if they are can only reduce public, research and policy perspectives of the severity/importance of the disorder (not to mention perceptions on the importance of prevention).

Tagging @Markku @Hazel here, because I think this could be a really useful early goal of future research.

 

I thinks ton of people have mild and especially periodic tinnitus. I think that is why they say that 10% of people have tinnitus. Obviously it is an entirely different beast than severe tinnitus, but yes I think if it is mild (it has been mild for me for maybe 10 minutes of my 5 months of otherwise very intuitive Tinnitus) that just not paying attention to it would be a pretty good strategy.

 

Although I agree, wouldn't changing the name mean a long process of then making people understand what the new term is?

 

Possibly, yes. But it's really the medical/research community that would need to get on board; the public would follow in turn. As a scientist, I have some capacity to write to the medical/research audience, to put forth scientific rationale for why subtyping is medically important. There's no guarantee that it gets picked up...but the tinnitus research community is pretty small, and this is pretty well-reasoned...so it just might (particularly if it helps clarify future research efforts).

Truthfully, this is really a branding issue: the tinnitus brand is vague, confused. Yes, altering your brand necessarily leads to a certain period of change/uncertainty - but if well-intentioned and appropriate, it can ultimately be very beneficial.