I have tinnitus. I don't recommend it

Tinnitus has many causes. Most of them are avoidable but some (antibiotics) less so.

People's ability to internalise a coping mechanism also varies. My own ability rises and sets like the tide. Some days it's all encompassing and some days it's just the liveness check for the nuclear storage tank alarm which reassures me I'm not dead yet.

White noise can help. Tuned noise can help. Other sounds can help. Apple ipods are said to help. It's all subjective. Do you want to test a rather odd mouth fitted electrode plate and a series of tuned sounds? It might help, and is being licenced with Food and Drugs.

Seeing "the Who" live in Glasgow twice in the 70s probably triggered mine. Or a number of other over-amped gigs. But my GP assured me the drugs for blood pressure, or antibiotics, or any number of situations were just as likely or what is known as "idiopathic" which is Latin for "who knows"

My partners tinnitus is much more intrusive and causes her more grief, since she now misses much ambient bird song lost in the ear soup. Beyond commiserations there isn't much I can say, inside my own kilohertz whine sound bath.

https://therapistwithtinnitus.com/2023/01/31/is-tinnitus-tra...

Phillips JS, Erskine S, Moore T, Nunney I, Wright C. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing as a treatment for tinnitus. Laryngoscope. 2019 Oct;129(10):2384-2390. doi: 10.1002/lary.27841. Epub 2019 Jan 28. PMID: 30693546.

Rikkert M, van Rood Y, de Roos C, Ratter J, van den Hout M. A trauma-focused approach for patients with tinnitus: the effectiveness of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing - a multicentre pilot trial. Eur J Psychotraumatol. 2018 Sep 11;9(1):1512248

Moore, Tal & Phillips, John & Erskine, Sally & Nunney, Ian. (2020). What Has EMDR Taught Us About the Psychological Characteristics of Tinnitus Patients?. Journal of EMDR Practice and Research. 14. 229-240. 10.1891/EMDR-D-19-00055.

"This brief summary considered literature from both the hearing and trauma disciplines, with the goal of reviewing mechanisms shared between tinnitus and PTSD, as well as clinical reports supporting mutual reinforcement of both their symptoms and the effects of therapeutic approaches."

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/12/11/1585

"clinicians who offer tinnitus and hyperacusis rehabilitation should screen for suicidal and self-harm ideations among patients with symptoms of depression and a childhood history of parental mental illness"

https://tinnitustherapy.org.uk/adverse-childhood-experiences...

"Good mental health/EMDR treatment with tinnitus includes a comprehensive phase 1 history taking, targeting any precipitating trauma experiences, and “float back,” targeting the negative cognitions about the present experience of tinnitus."

https://www.emdria.org/blog/emdr-therapy-and-tinnitus/

Do you also get hurt when hearing loud bass / infra bass ?

(1) One time when I was going to setup the drums to play for a band, walked front of a tall speaker and precisely when I stepped in front of it a loud boom scaped from it; and

(2) covid-19.

It's kind of in "stereo", in the right ear is a bit louder and with a higher pitch than in the left ear. I can't imagine how terrible it is for people with worse cases but in my case I can live with it despite sometimes I have trouble hearing some stuff - but it's kind of uncanny sometimes I even forget about it until I remember I have it, like now reading "tinnitus" in the title of this article. Something like the yawn effect.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/08/29/business/3m-settlement-mi...

They also thought they could adjust or move equipment without muting the channel on the mixer.

It is absolutely crazy to tap your mic when you know that booms are bound to reverberate from your powered-up PA system.

Microphones amplify human speech. They are not drums. Why not test them by speaking or singing in front of them?

I kept telling them that one day they would damage either a speaker, an amp, or someone’s perfectly good hearing.

I am in my 50s and the most notable 'side effect' is that I must avoid conference calls; it seems unconsciously I got good at reading lips in person, even in groups, but video calls and especially audio calls are just too hard. I tell people now I'm handicapped, which is indeed true I guess; we either meet in person or they will have to write it down. Captions sometimes work, but we work with people from around the world and some English accents just generate mostly random words as captions. Not sure why a discussion about a payment api is mostly about rain, goats, [laughter], [music] and such...

In my case it was never severe but I've heard of people woken up by their tinnitus.

Thankfully it has mostly subsided. These days I barely notice it unless I'm in a very quiet environment.

You might get one of those low-end decibel meters that supposedly are calibrated at the factory (around $25 in the US), to measure how loud the sirens are. Maybe they're louder than they need to be, and you can request for them to be adjusted, as a public health improvement.

I've been meaning to do something like this. My city has sirens throughout the day, but one particular ambulance company's seems much louder to me than any other company or other emergency vehicle -- dangerously louder. As someone who walks miles every day, on major streets and near hospitals, the near-daily potential hearing damage risk has started to get a bit concerning. I'd like to have data (and make sure it's not just a frequency sensitivity specific to me), before I ask them respectfully if the volume can be adjusted.

https://www.tinnitustreatmentreport.com/

I've had mild tinnitus as long as I can remember; my earliest memory of it must have been when I was about four years old. I suspect I've had it my entire life. When I was a child, I thought it was just something normal that everybody had. When I heard the Simon and Garfunkel song, "The Sound of Silence", I thought that was what they were talking about.

It makes reading harder, and with modern tools it certainly isn't any easier to write—with both those things working against it I doubt it'll stick around.

With so many new, markup words everyday on social media ("enshittifcation" - i am looking at you), autocorrect can be annoying.

Keeping computer commands in notes also prompt me to turn off autocapitalisation

Once they are off, typing in lowercase is just natural

Luckily it went away. I wear ear protection all the time now. agree that there should be laws governing sound volume.

Pete Townsend has said his own hearing loss distressed him enormously.

To get a rough reading, your smartphone can provide that data via app. Then you would have some numbers you can tell official people - and then they can measure again with calibrated eqipment if in doubt.

That’s just normal, but when I’m tired or stressed, my blood pressure is up, or I’m sick, it’s what most people probably classify as tinnitus and is at a much lower frequency, more of a high pitched tone.

The two versions read slightly differently to me. So I assume the slight different tone is part of the point.

the real reason is it's conversational. it's casual. it removes the gap between the reader and the writer

it's how people talk in a chat with their friends

in pretty much every language across the world, writing was always "formal" and lacked the voice of a couple of people having a chat. at some points, writing was even a separate language. east asian people did lots of their correspondence in classical chinese instead of using their own languages. the catholic church hated the idea of people reading the bible in anything but latin

then people chilled out and realized writing how we speak makes it more accessible to everyone. and that's not a bad thing, it's a good thing. novels started taking a more conversational style and some people looked down on that decades ago. now those novels are considered classics, and honestly, i'd attribute half of that to their writing seeming "formal" in retrospect because formal speech today is yesterday's casual speech. now people will revolt against modern writing and think it's below them. in 5 decades people will think this kind of writing is very formal

basically, it doesn't make it harder. it makes it easier. people write how they think and they don't worry about being perfect. and as another commenter said, autoformatting and autocorrecting tools just break shit more than they fix it these days. i can't even type "i have 5 pennies" without my phone correcting it to "I have 5 Pennie's" for some reason.

Yeah, OK, I should have written "for social signaling".

> basically, it doesn't make it harder.

Iassureyou,capitalizationisn'tbecauseit'spretty.Aspectsofwrittenlanguageareoftenthereforverygoodreasonsrelatedtomakingreadinglower-effort.

(PhyPhox on my phone says it wants to be "calibrated" against one of those meters, but I haven't checked how accurate it is without that.)

it is an interesting point to take, to claim that lowercase makes reading difficult. 12 year olds have no problem communicating this way and it's very easily understood. same with 30 somethings such as myself. it's not really the responsibility of the youth to limit their expression for the comprehension older people who don't engage with things they consider below them

german has even more extreme capitalization and english tossed out those rules. Maybe We could return to Something Similar to the Rules that German uses and That could be helpful for easy Reading?

or maybe english speakers just decided those rules were annoying and dropped them and people never missed those rules decades later when we forgot they ever existed

So now I wear a helmet

I'm sure its more than that, but thats when i first noticed it.

Hate it, but have learned to just accept it.

Some 30,000 nerves along the path from ear to cortex in 4 neuronal stages. An awful lot. That would make pain and discomfort after hearing damage (and slowness of healing) a sort of canary that there might be some systemic problem with myelin or nutrition. (try "Key Nutrients for Myelin Support") and try to binge on those items if you are ready to try anything.)

I've had temporary damage with effects lasting a week. I was a sound guy and have at times troubleshooted crossover networks that peaked around 3kHz and it wasbad, but the very worst was dropping a 60lb steel theater weight onto a pile of other weights. Didn't even hear the sound but hearing went silent for 5 minutes and took a week to all come back! Also ultrasonics that were felt as pressure not sound. I recovered completely and have a rolloff beyond 13k that is probably age. But it's scary, I hope you heal!

This greg.technology gent is not just any ear blaster, he brought us Sonic Garbage ( https://sonicgarbage.greg.technology/ ) that has been featured here on HN. And check out his cheerleading offer at ( https://blog.greg.technology/ ). It looks like a good deal because I've exchanged emails with him and he is a plain spoken cheerful guy... the offer is not satire in any way.

I spent a lot of days/months totally devastated about it. I remember reading this story about some woman in a scandinavian country who chose medical-assisted suicide because hers was so bad. I thought that was going to be my story. I thought it was inevitable.

But I met a lot of people who lived completely normal lives and described their tinnitus as so much worse than mine. I eventually got used to it. I wouldn't say the actual ringing is better or worse than it was. I have no idea how to measure it anyways. But life has gotten so much better. And I almost never think about it any more -- maybe once every few weeks I'll have the thought, "Oh ya, I have ringing in my ears" and a few seconds later I forget about it again. I think it gets better for most people, thankfully.

But it'd be cool to hear complete silence again.

Never bothered me much. Its much worse now at times. Still doesnt bother me much

Luckily neither of these tinnituses bothers me as much as the subject of that story. In fact they don't bother me much at all anymore, although the pulsatile one did cause a great deal of anxiety when it first developed seemingly out of nowhere. My brain has learned to adapt and ignore the sounds pretty easily unless I'm in a quiet room and have nothing else to focus on.

And a tip for anyone suffering: I've found that those "8 hours of brown noise" loops on YouTube work wonders for drowning out the sound of both regular and pulsatile tinnitus.

With that said, I don’t think it would lessen tinnitus, and I don’t think the parent comment was suggesting it would.

[0]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/120992

The book is a quick read and helpful: https://a.co/d/ckOzbSq

I no longer meditate as often, but when I do, it’s actually still quite effective. I now see it more as a “retreat” of sorts - I can just kind of dissociate and let the ringing take over. Reading this article brought it back, incidentally.. but I’m ok with it. Once you fully surrender to the noise, you can start to let go of it. It’s the mental resistance that makes it hard to deal with.

I got some nice ear plugs designed for concerts (Loop) because I go to a concert and I already have mild tinnitus and don't want it to get worse.

I do not know why concerts have to be SO LOUD. Loud, sure. Permanent ear damage loud, why? It should tell you something that the guys on stage wear ear plugs.

That's a really good point about hearing damage vs eye damage, the only thing I can think of is it's a lot harder to measure and people don't care as much. It would be really hard to prove you had hearing loss in a court of law, let alone that it came from one specific event, and you'd have a much easier time proving that a high powered laser blinded several people, perhaps. And nearly 100% of people would choose "deaf" if they were forced to pick between that and blind.

Coping was hard. Distracting yourself with various things so you dont think about it was key.

Things to try - 1) Keeping yourself distracted or occupied and trying to not be conscious about it for 50% of the day to start with, gradually improving to 90% of the day 2) White noise apps for sleep 3) Carry ear plugs at all times. Plug them in if watching a movie in a theatre or attending to an Indian wedding. Prevents worsening of the situation.

To those out there: you're not alone. The journey is different for everyone, and what helps one person might not help another — but with patience and experimentation, many find ways to manage and live fully despite it.

Mostly I'm at a point i don't hear it at all unless I get very distracted or see anything that mentions it. Like right now reading this post and the comments LOL.

Do you think a lot of it has to do with having the right mindset?

However, for the past 3 or 4 years, during spring, I get much worse tinnitus in my right ear for a couple weeks. It appears to be caused by some kind of blockage in my inner ear due to the inevitable viruses we catch during the winter. It's louder and a lower pitch (around 3 kHz, unlike my 10+ kHz normal one), and even though it's not the first time this happens by now, it's still extremely annoying. It's harder to just ignore, and my mind immediately starts thinking "what if this lasts forever?"

So I can imagine that for those who develop tinnitus at adulthood, it can cause a lot more distress, because they lived the "before".

If you’re going to concerts / loud venues regularly, please for the love of god invest in some decent earplugs. They go for $15-30 on amazon and come with a carrying case usually, it’s a simple habit that will save you lots of heartache down the line.

I have often wondered this. So it’s non-deafening loud at the back? I was at a concert recently that was way too loud. A sound guy came to check and stood in front of the speakers. I thought finally it’s going to be turned down … nope … clearly his hearing had already gone which would explain why it was so loud.

I think my hearing has been damaged in the past and so I now always have either AirPods at the very least or earplugs on hand. If anything loud, like heavy construction next to a bus stop, is happening I put them in. I can’t undo the past but I can prevent future damage.

You might try alergy meds (pills or nasal inhalers) to try to clear that up. I wouldn't expect it to do anything for your chronic tinnitus though.

I'm surprised there is not some method to surgically disconnect the brain from the ear.

I also had to go have a nap in the car waiting for the main act to come on.

Now, being able to use a hot-swappable audio sensor instead of an ear made of tissue would be pretty dope.

I also notice a low-level tinnitus when I'm in very quiet places. I keep white noise machines around to cover it.

It’s one thing to have conversational style and another to (almost) completely disregard grammar.

> i can't even type "i have 5 pennies" without my phone correcting it to "I have 5 Pennie's" for some reason.

Let me guess: an iPhone? What a motherf**ing garbage the new iOS keyboard is. Hope whoever worked on it reads this and feels ashamed.

> continues to provide reasons why it is signaling

My advice to anyone struggling with tinnitus is to avoid silence for a while. Focus on anything but the tinnitus. Never give yourself the chance to focus on it. Buy bone conductor headphones and listen to ambient music instead of sitting in silence. Buy a white noise machine for when you go to bed, or run a fan. Then spend a few minutes every waking hour of your day actively listening to the sounds around you

Eventually you'll have trained yourself to listen to something else. As long as there's something else to listen to, even if it is very quiet, you'll default to listening to that instead of your tinnitus until it becomes something you do passively.

I might as well not have tinnitus anymore. I can't speak for everyone, especially not in regards to hypersensitivity to noise like the author here has, but I went from mourning the loss of my daily comfort to completely forgetting about the problem in a couple of months.

Last time I went to a party, I pulled out an AirPods when we were (practically) standing in front of the speakers. Still remember puzzled and “not cool, dude” looks, lol. I’m not taking chances with this tinnitus crap after what I read online.

Like HFT, every nanosecond matters.

The low level tinitus in a quiet room seems pretty normal to me, it's your brain looking for really quiet noises that are at the limit of what your ears can pick up. Or something, I'm no expert on it.

That said, always having some white noise or music going helped a lot

About 6 months after onset it disappeared as quickly and mysteriously as it first appeared.

I'm sitting alone in a quiet room typing this and I've got a cacophony of >12kHz whine going in both ears. The left is slightly louder and lower than the right. It's not debilitating but it would be really neat to hear actual silence once in awhile.

I played w/ doing hearing range tests on myself and my friends using an old NEC V20-based laptop during my high school days (mid-90s). I wrote a little BASIC program that played sounds of increasing frequency and asked you to report if you could hear the sound. Sometimes it indicates it's playing a sound when it isn't. By playing (or not playing) sounds repeatedly I would build up a "score" for the user's high frequency hearing response.

I have notes showing I could hear between 16 and 17 kHz back then. Today I struggle to hear more than 12 kHz. Interestingly, my tinnitus presents frequencies high than I can actually hear now.

It is totally possible to exist with it though.

A few years ago I fired-up a 15 kHz monitor for my Apple II and my then 5 y/o daughter held her ears and complained that there was a terrible screeching sound that hurt her ears. Between losing the top-end of my hearing with age and the end of CRTs being mainstream display technology I'd forgotten about tube whine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyback_transformer

(All the silly thing did was chain together stanzas randomly based on subjective "scores" I'd given to each stanza and the position of the "knobs" the user set for various "feelings". It was a fun gimmick 30 years ago. God. I'm old...)

For those with unilateral tinnitus that seems influenced by neck stretches or TMJ issues, try sleeping on your back or on the opposite side to avoid pressure on the affected ear.

Also, consider getting an MRI to check for possible causes; in my case, a vascular loop was found contacting the vestibulocochlear nerve inside the internal auditory canal.

While I consider my case largely managed, it still flares up a few times per month, usually triggered by irritation or inflammation (allergens, getting sick, poor neck posture, loud music for hours)

proceeds to rip off ears

To me, regular tinnitus (which I also had for a few days after concerts) could be matched and recreated with a tone generator, and is much more “in your face” despite being the same volume by the end of my ears healing.

Aether noise on the other hand sounds multi tone, not a buzz or a hum. I have not yet managed to recreate it. I can hear it all the time if I can focus on it, but it only calls attention to itself in dead silence.

Do you have visual snow by chance too?

When I reach flow, I tend to not notice until later that I'd now be sitting cross-legged, or that I've tucked one leg under myself.

That pressure tends to trigger the sound you describe after a while. I imagine because of bad blood circulation, though I have no idea why it's that sound signalling that for me.

[1] https://www.dwmaudiology.com.au/services/hyperacusis/

Funny thing is every time I mentioned this IRL there's always someone who has experienced it too, like some sort of common mystery condition

- A faint multi-tonal background "hiss", only apparent during silence, never goes away but is quite relaxing. I'm hesitant to even call it tinnitus - Visual snow. I have early memories from at least 5 or 6, staring at the blue sky and noticing it's not pure (I see blue as everyone else, but with a very transparent layer of static)

I have attributed it to something "off" in the sensory filtering part of my brain

Some reporting in there, Facebook group survey, and Tinnitus (12,532) is the 44th complaint among nearly 700,000 reported in the Vaccine Adverse Effect Reporting System.

Wear ear plugs at gigs, kids. Older you will thank you.

Not quite tinnitus, much less drastic than anyone describing their diagnosed visual snow symptoms. Could be a very mild case of VSS or an yet to be named condition.

Maybe if you could stick something like a neuralink in there?

I wondered this myself too. One thing I do know is nobody was able to relate from friends and family when mentioning this. Visual snow syndrome (which according to affected people online can be very disabling) was only first described as late as 2015 according to wikipedia. So we may never know at this pace.

I'm sure it will happen again, and I can only hope that the acceptance phase keeps working.

[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21970850/

It's a funny thing - like a bear in the woods type thing. Sometimes, when its existence gets called to my attention, like when I started reading this story and the comments just now, I suddenly realize how loud it is - but also how I've gone about my whole day without any problems, despite it having been there all the time. Not sure if that makes sense, but that's my experience and it's - fine, really.

Not saying that you shouldn't try other things, and I also don't really know how to get there beyond going easy on yourself. I'm just saying that to me being able to ignore it makes a huge difference in my life quality and so I think it's very worth pursuing. Good luck!

I've had tinnitus in both my ears for 25 years.

Knowing that tidbit you mention, I've always wo dered if it would be possible to invent a "switch" that completely "cuts" the communication between the ears and the brain (making you temporarily deaf . So that you can turn it on at nights while in bed, and turn it on in the morning.

That would be a huge relief. And can be "rougher" than trying to stop the specific misfiring nerves

I've heard that TMJ can cause it as well.

Interestingly, my five-year-old was complaining about ringing in her ears being distracting at bed time, so I wonder if it is genetic too.

[1] https://audioinstallations.co.uk/blog/stage-monitors-how-do-... [2] https://www.newsweek.com/taylor-swift-eras-tour-cruel-summer...

the other is tinnitustalk support https://www.tinnitustalk.com/. it also covers upcoming possible tinnitus treatments and ways of coping with it

I remember reading a long time ago that it was caused by "the neurons in your ears occasionally randomly firing" but I cannot find any source for that, so assume that it's untrue :)

Music can also sound better when it's louder, up to a certain point - if you're recording and mixing a piece of music, you want to do so at a very moderate volume, because if you crank it up loud some of the imbalances in the mix become less obvious.

That said, there's 'loud enough that the music sounds good and you're mostly hearing music and not audience', and then there was the Prodigy concert I went to, where I was wearing earplugs and my ears still hurt. Amazing concert, but holy crap, probably the loudest situation I've ever encountered. I've also been right in front of the speakers at a festival dance tent, and my earplugs rattled due to sound pressure, which was unnerving but quite funny.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21970850/

I work with computers a lot and my spine was paying a price. In my late twenties I started working out and doing yoga and later pilates to strengthen my back and straighten my spine. My tinnitus went away. Something was being pinched in my neck, causing the tinnitus.

I'm not sure this is your problem, but it might help someone out there.

I think the doctor have done some malpractice to my ear.

I cleaned my ear because my sony xm4 in ear keep clogged and dirty

if I know, I would change the eartips to silicon since beginning instead foam, fuck the redditard who ridicule me for asking about tips to reduce the dirtyness of sony eartips

Thus older folks lose high-frequency hearing because those hair cells deteriorate first; thus you may lose hearing at certain frequencies and... why not, the cells can be damaged in a way that causes them to hear things that are not there, with the frequency spectrum of the tinnitus "tone" mapping onto the damage.

Comments? I don't see a single reference to "hair cell" in this comment stream so far.

As for broad spectrum hearing damage, and how young people think all parts of their body are immortal. I once in my early 20s spent a single afternoon playing ping pong in a basement in which a very loud amateur rock band was also practicing. They were to my right. It was so loud it physically hurt. A few years later, I happened to have a hearing test as part of the induction into my workplace, and... would you believe it... my right ear is about 3dB less sensitive than my left. The brain makes up for the imbalance, but threshold-of-hearing tests don't lie.

So I got to be stupid once. No tinnitus, no obvious disability. But ever since then the rule has applied: If it hurts, it's causing permanent damage, so avoid. Ear plugs, at least the wax type (Ohropax, from Germany) can be fairly discreetly worn if you must be cool and party near the big loudspeakers.

My girlfriend at the time told me I needed to try this "new pillow that's the best." I woke up with a kink in my neck and an ear that was screaming at me (2300 Hz for those masochists that want to know what it sounded like).

Took around four years to track it down and get it mostly solved.

The screaming is gone most of the time now, but occasionally I'll move a certain way and it will suddenly come back. A firm press with my thumb in a particular spot on the back/side of my neck for a few seconds will be enough to get it to go away.

Decades later, after taking one pill of Zyban (to help quit smoking, Wellburtin-class), I lost the rest of my hearing in less than 30 minutes … permanently, but tinnitus went like mind-deafening.

7 years later, I opted for cochlear implants: and what do you know, tinnitus is barely there, almost gone.

not sure how to explain this, but it is largely gone, this tinnitus. I suspected that natural background noise is keeping this feedback loops (tinnitus) from mainfesting in my auditorial part of the brain.

Hearing largely restored in terms of jumpy crescendo yet fuller-spectrum, but dang, I hear farther than ever did before, like in Jamie Sommers of Bionic Woman.

I still operate in a high-stress environment of frontline cybersecurity, yet am more calmer and more responsive.

Highly recommended, unless you value your musical skill over tinnitus.

I had tinnitus and hearing loss due to rock concerts, but not pain. Get it checked

"i have tinnitus. i don't recommend it."

Does it get automatically uppercased, I wonder?

From what I've rad tinnitus can be caused by a) shift in small transmission bones, can be age related. 2) inner ears sensors mess up, can be from loud sound. 3) something else, like infection, inflammation, inner ear pressure build up (may be Ménière's disease).

Hope technology develops fast, some sort of implant talking directly to the audio nerve. I think they already exist or are in development. This can give in theory ultra- and infra-sound sensitivity too, as a bonus.

Hairs can mess up from loud sound. there was a story a few year back, a man killed himself a month after a loud concert. This is only one possible reason.

Interesting theory. Yeah, for me, it often happens when I'm sitting still working. I have never noticed it in response to sound. But, yeah, I can imagine it being some innocuous physical thing in the fluid.

> The low level tinitus in a quiet room seems pretty normal to me, it's your brain looking for really quiet noises that are at the limit of what your ears can pick up. Or something, I'm no expert on it.

Yeah, might be somewhat like the hum when the gain is turned up on a guitar amp and nothing's playing. Basically just amplifying the noise floor. I'm not sure if it's true tinnitus, or just my brain filling in for the white noise I normally have in the background.

then start drumming

thump thump thump thump a couple of times

will quiet it down a bit

then white noise machines at night if it's getting to you, until it doesn't

I think you are thinking of Gaby Olthuis. Her story is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzQ6kSqBOao

But if you are one of the "common kind", which is typically an insult to your hearing apparatus that damaged your cochlea, then the work from Susan Shore [2] is a reasonable explanation of what could actually be going on (genesis by the fusiform cells of the dorsal cochlear nucleus). You may be interested in checking out her publications listed in the wikipedia article quoted.

[1] https://www.tinnitusresearch.net/index.php/for-clinicians/di... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Shore

It’s on my list. Great news, 11% chance of tinnitus reported in one study and 7% in another. Tinnitus > Migraines any day.

https://reference.medscape.com/drug/valproic-acid-343024

Except for occupational hazard of being reminded of it once a year in IT newsletter by people spreading awareness, it's mostly fine. It only takes a couple of weeks to forget about it again.

Probably I should make an IT blog that brings awareness to the process of breathing.

if the mere act of people using language to communicate frustrates you, that is a personal problem

today's right grammar is yesterday's wrong grammar. yesterday's right grammar is today's cringe tryhard writing. languages evolve

and tbh most people who demand strict compliance are always the ones who make grammatical mistakes and don't realize it

> What a motherf*ing garbage the new iOS keyboard is

is not grammatically correct. "a" breaks the sentence

Percussion massage gun with the sharp tip, aimed at the trapezius and levator scapulae. Those muscles can refer tension right around the ears. Targeting them can calm things down fast, especially if your tinnitus is posture or tension-related.

Not medical advice.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8443418/

Also, National Geographic (paywalled): https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/covid-va...

https://www.abc15.com/news/local-news/investigations/can-the...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/03/health/covid-vaccines-sid...

And I have more, and I'm sure there are many more since. This one discusses the fact that even scientists have been reluctant to report this harm, for fear of being "canceled:" https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/tinnitus-rare-sid...

A specialist I saw at UCLA came right out and said "this is a true agent" (pretty sure that was the terminology he used) and that information on it has been actively suppressed.

Aside from suppression, there's a huge under-reporting problem here. I had to spend a lot of time seeking out specialists for this issue, time that I happened to have and the insurance and money to pursue it. That is not MOST people.

General practitioners and even first-level ENTs pretty much shrugged and suggested known-to-be-ineffective treatment like steroids. Do you think these guys reported my complaint as vaccine-related to some central database?

Of course I did, but again... I'm sure that puts me in a small minority. Also I had good hearing and immediately noticed the problem. In fact, I have diligently protected my hearing my whole life, wearing ear plugs even in loud pubs.

So I submit that this is a way bigger problem than the "stats" show... stats that (even so) DO indicate a problem.

It's been exhausting to respond to (reasonable) questions about non-anecdotal evidence... or outright scorn, with personally-scraped-up evidence that should have been public knowledge.

Everyone should have been armed with this information before making a risk/reward decision about the vaccine, especially as it became less effective and/or critical. Now I have a degraded life for a nearly-useless second booster.