Why Is Hope Important in Dealing With Tinnitus?

Hi all, I wanted to share with you the following email I got today from Peter Phua of AudioNotch. I liked it myself, hope you do too.


From: Dr. Peter Phua of AudioNotch.com


Why hope?

It’s a simple question.

Despite the best efforts of medical science, and despite the existence of treatments that can lessen your suffering, there still exists no cure for tinnitus.

I regularly get e-mails from people who have slipped into despair. They tell me that they can’t sleep because of the noise. They tell me they can’t relax for even a couple minutes because of the fire alarm going off inside their head. They tell me that they’re depressed, cornered, trapped by their illness. They tell me they can’t work, or concentrate.

Most of all, they tell me they have no hope.

They think about silence all day long. They think about how incredible it would be to get back something that the average person takes for granted: peace and quiet.

I’m not writing to you today to talk about this or that treatment that’s “on the horizon” or that’s “nearly passed clinical trials.” When the scientifically researched, evidence based cure for tinnitus arrives, everyone will know about it. It’ll be so effective that it won’t need any type of marketing. The fact is, solving tinnitus involves selectively fixing aberrant neurological circuits within the brain (or developing effective stem cell transplantation of hearing cells into adult humans). A cure is years away.

But you’re in pain now.

I know. I get it. I was there too.

I can’t cure your tinnitus today. The fact is, no one can (with the exception of tinnitus caused by treatable secondary causes like high blood pressure, etc.).

What I can give to you is hope. What I can give to you is encouragement. I can tell you that you’ve got to take it one day at a time. Life is hard on everyone and we all have our struggles. Fate has decided that this will be yours. You may not be able to control the existence of your tinnitus, but you can control how you react to it. You can control how to cope with it. You can treat difficulties with mood and sleep, lessening your pain. You can decide that you won’t let this illness defeat you, and that you’re going to go on and fight for the things in life that you care about. You can decide that you’re not going to let it stop you.

Hope is necessary to keep going. Hope is what’s going to keep you alive, and pull you out of this pit of misery.

Here’s an eighteenth century Frenchman, describing his tinnitus:

Who was that man? He was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A Frenchman whose political philosophy shaped the French revolution and changed the arc of history.

I know you’re in pain. I know it hurts. So do me a favour, okay?

Keep your chin up, and don’t let it stop you.



Dr. Peter Phua, AudioNotch

 

Thank you for sharing.

 

Motivates me

 

Hi Frohike,

I know hoping is a beautiful thing... But...for me it's the opposite: when it comes to tinnitus. Because as soon as I stopped hoping for T wil go away... I became sort of calm and better coping.

My ENT told me there was hope tinnitus might go away.
I guess he did not dare to say the true.

Better for me was that he was honest and told me: you have to deal with it, there is no cure.
Because by his words, I was hoping for too long...
And I was for month's and month's in tears and panick attacks, and dissapointing every morning T was there again... because I was HOPING it should dissapear....

So I am 'glad' I stopped hoping a few weeks ago.
Since then I am more calm and less dissapointed.

I know it's different for any one of us, but for me... stop hoping, was better dan keep hoping....

Gabriëlle

 

There are cases of t going away on its own but if its been there for maybe a year?? (could be off with that one) then maybe hope Is looking a bit further away but not impossible as my grandfather had t for about 3 years when he was in his 60's and his went somehow. Maybe its tough to mix hope and expectation, you can hope it goes but not expect it to go, that way u wont be disappointed. I hope for mine to go as a new case, hoping it will go helps me

 

Hope is like a psychological "life preserver" that helps a person that's already discouraged by a difficult situation from sinking further into despair. During difficult times, we need hope to be able to cope.

 

Interesting to read Rousseau's description of his tinnitus. It makes me realise how (relatively) fortunate we are to be living with T in the 21st century and not the 18th. We are living in a time when medical research offers real hope of progress towards developing treatments for our condition. In that sense, we have more reasons to be optimistic than Rousseau and his contemporaries.

Of course, it is important to have hope but we must also live in the present. Hope only becomes a negative attribute if we put our plans on hold in anticipation of that great day when our T will be reduced or eliminated altogether.

 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Influential eighteenth century political philosopher. From "Confessions" (1780) "...a great noise started up in my ears, a noise that was triple or rather quadruple, compounded of a low and muffled humming, a softer murmuring as though of running water, a piercing whistle...This internal noise was so loud that it robbed me of the keen ear I had previously enjoyed and made me, not completely deaf, but hard of hearing... in spite of the throbbing in my arteries and the humming in my ears, which since that time, some thirty years ago now, have never left me for a moment...The noise was irksome, but it caused me no suffering: it was not accompanied by any chronic affliction, apart from insomnia at night..." P. 222, Oxford World's Classics paperback edition, Oxford University Press, 2000