Tinnitus: you don’t have to live with it | Deafness and hearing loss
We write as a former colleagues who worked together from the 1980s to identify the cause of tinnitus. After the explosion of negativity on the distress of tinnitus on your page of letters (August 10), we feel forced to put more than a good news in the discussion. Being able to hear tinnitus at some point is almost universal. Persistent painful tinnitus are largely due to the meaning attributed to it and to the subsequent subsequent emotions, which establish an conditioned response which does not get used to it. Sounds that threaten require our constant attention.
The recycling therapy of tinnitus, which follows the science of the Jastreboff model and our research, has been very successful. Although there is no quick solution, it is a slow solution that really works when patiently followed, and is used by audiologists around the world. Visit Tinnitus.org and Tinnitus-pjj.com to decide. You don’t have to live with it.
Jonathan Hazell
Honorary Neuro-Obtologist, University College London (retired); ancient directorTinnitus and Hyperacusis Center, London
Pawel Jastreboff
Guest teacher,, UCL; Professor Emeritus, Department of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Emory University School of Medicine
My tinnitus began after using a mouse -repelling system that emits a high level frequency and that humans cannot hear. He mainly continued as a constant noise to pitch as well as the sound of the plug-in, but pointed once and sounded as an airplane was about to crash into the room.
When I can’t endure the acute sound, I put my NHS ear devices which give off a “mixing” sound of white noise, canceling the noise in my head. I chose to live with her rather than suffering from anxiety and distress because of this, because I know that she will never disappear.
Karen Royall
Wigton, Cumbria
I am 73 years old. I do not know how long I had tinnitus, but I certainly had it after a spell in a woodworking factory, unprotected, in 1970, and it is 55 years and count. Since then, it has always been present, a continuous experience of multiple and swirling whistles (like standing on the shore of an electronic ocean) accompanied by the tick-tray of a pocket watch. It is at worst when I am surrounded by silence at night.
But he also conspired to make my presence in a company more difficult, because my brain ages and finds more difficult to select the sounds on which it must concentrate. I’m not going to parties anymore and I can’t hear in noisy pubs or restaurants. It masks dialogue when I watch television or movies.
I gave up waiting for a remedy. I don’t even expect my general practitioner to care. Their indifference, derived, I think, of their helplessness in the face of it, makes it embarrassing to refer to it. But its impact on my life, both in work and social, has been enormous and entirely negative. My sympathy goes to many colleagues victims.
Christopher House
Hertford
