Tinnitus Masking: In-Ear Maskers

But questions are:

- How loudly do the receivers play at 12,000 Hz? Do they put out significant volume or barely a sound?
- Is the sound at 12,000 Hz clear, or is it heavily distorted?

I'm not sure there are good answers to these questions available, which is why I suggest testing for yourself if you can.

 

Tinnitus maskers are something I really consider buying and using because it doesn't look like my very ugly tinnitus is going to be a bit better/softer despite many treatments/therapies so I need to do something more radical to get a better life.

I am scared the maskers won't mask my tinnitus fully and that even with the white noise in the background I would still hear that ugly unstable randomly pulsing high pitched hiss that my tinnitus is. My second concern is that since I have noticed some hearing distortions, I fear that the tinnitus will react to the white noise.

However, when I breathe louder, it seems to mask it pretty well, therefore it might work. In that case, I would like to get some maskers that are preferably in the ear and discrete, as I don't need hearing amplification because I have no hearing loss. Then I would use it 24/7 and in the meanwhile I would still regularly take Ginkgo biloba-like drugs I've been prescribed because they take months to work and there is still a chance they can make the tinnitus softer or even less loud. Just with the difference that I wouldn't depend on them like today because the tinnitus wouldn't be such a big issue.

Unfortunately, insurance companies will cover the cost of maskers only after a year of failed treatments, which would mean I can either wait and suffer for months or pay for the maskers myself out of pocket which isn't a great option considering the price but if they can help, then it doesn't matter that much.

I really don't care if the maskers will prevent me from habituating. The idea of having maskers that could permanently change my tinnitus to white noise appears enticing.

 

Personally I wouldn’t worry about this. An analogy is that when it’s cold out, you have to deal with the cold, but you also wear a jacket to help you deal with it. No one would say “but if you wear a jacket, how ever will you get used to dealing with the cold?” The point is that you don’t need to get *so* used to it as to be able to go outside jacketless. You can wear a jacket any time you want, so that’s the full extent you need to get used to.

I feel the same about white noise generators. If you can habituate to tinnitus while wearing white noise generators, in my opinion you are “as habituated as you need to be.”

 

Little update from my experience.

I still have not got tinnitus maskers, but I have visited local Phonak office to get some info about them. I must say, I am terrified. The employee was mean as hell, was literally laughing at me. She said there is no such thing as tinnitus maskers, only hearing aids with tinnitus masking as a secondary function. She wants €800 EUR for both hearing aids from me and doesn't even allow me to try it if I don't pay the full price first, and thanks to a mistake a stupid ENT that robbed and scammed me did, the insurance company might not even cover them for me, meaning I would have pay it entirely by myself.

I am still shocked how bad things are. They want me to put my entire year's scholarship for pathetic devices whose only function is to play a white noise to my ears and they are also mean as hell, like the good old "Our customer is our master" wasn't a thing at all. Their device is not even going to cure my tinnitus, only make me look like an idiot and force me to hear white noise for life. This is even worse than having vision loss and wearing glasses or hearing loss and wearing hearing aids. Because this is not like you wear it and hear silence.

I really expected to go to some nice looking office with kind empathic employees that understand my misfortune and try to find a solution that is worth the money. Instead, I came into trashy looking dirty office with fat angry woman that laughed and yelled at me, wanting hundreds of euros for nothing. Also, these Phonak hearing aids look like 20 years old, with stupid functions like Bluetooth and so on, that I do not need, and are huge, absolutely non-discreet.

I don't really know what to do now. I think wearing a $30 dollar Bluetooth earbuds would do the same. Do you know any other company that does these things? I found some very discreet at £250 GBP in-ear maskers from PureTone. However, these weirdos at Phonak wanted me to stay there for 1 hour so they could set the masker up for my tone. I don't know why it would take so long to set a volume of a white noise to have it masked. Also, my tinnitus is not a constant tone, it goes up and down. What if I ordered the PureTone ones from the UK and set them myself?

I don't know, maybe the fate will play against me and I will be forced to buy maskers from Phonak. But at the mment I am more angry than desperate, so I also think about not buying anything and try to learn to live with my tinnitus instead.

Sorry for the negativity in this post, I've been so angry. It literally feels some people are like "you have had misfortune that was not caused by you" - Let's make it even worse for you by taking all your money and making you feel a bit more miserable.

 

Sorry for my ignorance, but I see a lot of details about in-ear masking devices and why to use them, but not much discussion from folks who can say definitively that they have benefitted from using these things, much less a particular model.

Does anyone have success stories they could share with respect to habituation or full remission of their hyperacusis or tinnitus related to using in-ear noise generators?