The AudioNotch Tinnitus Treatment Blog

Below is an excerpt from a great article written by a tinnitus sufferer on how to meditate with tinnitus. As a tinnitus sufferer herself, the author can speak to the difficult daily reality of a person suffering from tinnitus. I think this another example of why the internet is such a powerful advocacy tool for people with tinnitus – we often feel isolated and that no one understands our suffering. Connecting with others in a similar plight online can alleviate this feeling of alienation and isolation. This advice also lines up with other advice that I’ve given on the … Continue Reading

The majority of our customers right now are from the United States, although as we continue to translate our site into other languages, this is changing. Lots of Americans search for music for tinnitus with the tagline “America Music for Tinnits 2014,*” and we’re able to point them towards Notched Music Therapy as an therapeutic option for their tinnitus.

The concept of using music as a therapy for an illness is, I think, inherently satisfying. I think that most of us have the experience of being emotionally distraught for one reason or another, and subsequently listening to a song that soothes … Continue Reading

The Tinnitus Research Initiative is a global research effort that brings together multidisciplinary expertise into the field of tinnitus research. One of the challenges about tinnitus is that understanding it seems to require a combination of “bottom-up” cellular biology and “top-down” neural circuitry. Combined these two “polar ends” of neuroscience research has been a vexing problem in neuroscience (not just for tinnitus researchers). Probing the neural circuits by determining the neural connectome is an arduous, difficult task, and more progress needs to be made. The nature of the research problem with respect to tinnitus is that real progress is often … Continue Reading

An American clinical trial is being launched for Vagal Nerve Therapy for tinnitus. This is pretty exciting news (although the research thus far is limited). A summary below:
The new study uses a technique known as vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) that takes advantage of the brain’s ability to reconfigure itself (neuroplasticity). During the therapy, patients wear headphones and hear a series of single frequency tones, paired with stimulation to the vagus nerve, a large nerve that runs from the head and neck to the abdomen. When stimulated, the vagus nerve releases acetylcholine, norepinephrine, and other chemicals that encourage neuroplasticity.

In an earlier … Continue Reading

One of the challenging things for patients who acutely develop tinnitus is the absence of therapeutic interventions available in the acute phase (i.e. shortly after a person develops tinnitus in a rapid fashion). Current theory surrounding the pathophysiology of tinnitus is that there is a “therapeutic window” in the acute term where the brain’s plasticity is still open to modification. Experiments have been done with N-acetylcysteine, for example, which was given to troops preventively in order to offset the excitotoxicity that causes hair cell death in the cochlea following acoustic trauma. However, after the acute phase, the brain seems to … Continue Reading

It’s definitely a headline-grabbing title: “Cure for Tinnitus 2014.” What are we talking about here, exactly? What kind of research is going on right now that could push us closer to a cure?

About a year ago I had an elective with a professor in Tinnitus research at McMaster University, and I asked him – if we could restore hearing to people with hearing loss induced tinnitus, would their tinnitus go away? And he answered in the affirmative. The restoration of normal auditory input should undo the maladaptive neuroplastic rewiring that causes the tinnitus in the first place. The problem – … Continue Reading

As a young person who developed tinnitus at 23, I had few people who could relate to my condition. That’s why I’m so glad that people are willing to share their stories of illness. I really enjoyed the following story on XoJane:
My life as I knew it ended with a slosh. Way back in 2003, when I was a junior in college, I noticed a sloshing sound in my right ear. I decided to ignore it. This is rather shocking given my predisposition for always assuming the worst, but telling my parents and going to the doctor seemed like the … Continue Reading

I’m just going to come out right now and say it: Tinnitus Talk is the best tinnitus forum out there on the internet. Bar none. The level of discussion there, as well as the community and the quality of web site design, is superb. It’s a great resource and I recommend that anyone with tinnitus check it out. I wish it was around when I first had tinnitus. It’s just an absolutely great resource and a great community. Although we like to blog as much as possible on AudioNotch, a forum is a great resource for tinnitus news and research … Continue Reading

Is there such a thing as Sound Therapy Music for tinnitus? The term can be used interchangeably with “Notched Music,” “Notched Music Therapy,” and other terms. Originally discovered by Christo Pantev’s German lab, other experiments have shown efficacy with Notching other sounds as well, such as white noise.

To read about the science behind Sound Therapy Music, click here.

To summarize: Sound Therapy Music takes a regular song, and then “notches out” the sound energy at and around the patient’s tinnitus frequency. Then, patients listen to the music and healthy and unhealthy auditory cells are differentially stimulated. The healthy … Continue Reading

“Composing the Tinnitus Suites: 2014,” or “Tinnitus 2014,” for short, is an art installation by Daniel Fishkin. I learned about this art installation when I stumbled upon this blog post:
Daniel Fishkin, a Brooklyn-based sound artist, seeks a creative solution to tinnitus in lieu of a medical one. Tinnitus, a condition in which one perceives a continuous high-pitched ringing sound, has affected Fishkin since 2008. Physicians are unable to offer any effective treatment beyond “getting used to it,” yet this solution treats the problem far too lightly. Fishkin explores this condition, and notions of loss and gain, through his musical sculpture … Continue Reading