Q: Is there any treatment for tinnitus? I have been affected for a few years and nothing seems to work.
A: Tinnitus is a sound that you hear in your ears or head that no one else can hear. It can sound like almost any sound you have ever heard, but it is often described as buzzing, humming, ringing, static, crickets, or white noise. It can be soft or loud, intermittent or constant, unchanging or ever changing. No objective measure for it is yet available. It is present in over 17% of the population and more frequent in the older age groups. Its nature and actual cause remain elusive.
Many treatments have come and gone for tinnitus, and many continue to be recycled. Herbal supplements, vitamin supplements, dietary restrictions and additions, electronic masking devices, holistic and spiritualistic approaches, and many others too numerous to mention here have been or continue to be touted as the new cure. To date, none of them have shown any benefit over placebo in a scientific study.
With no knowledge of what actually causes tinnitus, any jump to a cure has to be considered blind luck. However, there are some things that are known about tinnitus. Stress, fatigue, anxiety, and loud noise exposure tend to make it worse. Any intervention that lessens one of these makes the tinnitus better.
Although it doesn’t actually make the tinnitus worse, you are much more likely to be bothered by it when a room is very quiet.
A positive attitude entering into any particular intervention leads to a lessening of anxiety and almost always a reduction in tinnitus–the well known “placebo effect”. Although the tinnitus may resolve during some of these treatments, the actual cause of the resolution is unknown and unpredictable.
Future research focusing on ways to objectively measure tinnitus holds the key to understanding and eventually curing this common malady.
More on MSN Health & Fitness:
Do you have a health question you'd like to ask Harvard Medical School's experts? Send an e-mail to experts@microsoft.com. Please include Ask Harvard in the subject line.
Our experts respond to one question each week and the responses are posted on Mondays on MSN Health. We regret that we cannot provide a personalized response to every submission.
