More and more people are suffering from ringing or buzzing in the ear.
Millions of people are suffering from chronic tinnitus.The noises which patients hear permanently in their heads can vary considerably: they can be high- and low-pitched as well as buzzing, whistling and ringing noises.Some sufferers describe the condition sounding “as if a jet fighter were taking off inside the head,”.The consequences range from migraines and insomnia to depression and panic attacks. Many people are so badly afflicted that they are unable to work and some become so desperate that suicide is often on their minds.
The causes of tinnitus have yet to fully explained. “We have identified around 400 various reasons,” says Lutz-Michael Schaefer, ear, nose and throat specialist at the Habichtswald Ayerveda Tinnitus Clinic near Kassel, Germany.Sometimes a loud noise can be the trigger, but in around 30 per cent of cases, the DTL has identified damage to the inner ear caused by long-term exposure to loud noise at work or in free time. Other causes are side-effects brought on by drugs, allergies, metabolic disorders or illnesses of the hear, nose and throat regions.For many people, tinnitus aurium is also a symptom of stress.“Around two-thirds of all tinnitus patients report living under considerable stress before the disease appeared,” notes Schaefer.
They go on to suffer ringing or buzzing in the ear as tenseness leads to circulatory disorders within the organ which in turn leads to fine auditory hair cells which are unable to perform their function in filtering only relevant information to the brain.Around 70 per cent of all noises around us are filtered by the ear daily: “That explains why we can’t normally hear ourselves swallowing,” says Schaefer.Tinnitus patients have to relearn this filtering function from scratch and make a conscious effort to reduce stress levels to help them learn how to hear again.This is the concept employed in tinnitus retraining therapy (TRT). Tinnitus patients tend to become set on the idea that they are stuck with the noises. So, they have to learn to divert their perceptions to other noises. Methods to do this are provided by special hearing techniques.
When patients learn to concentrate on these tones, they can successfully cut out the ear noises. “It’s like living next to a train line,” says Elke Knoer, president of the Tinnitus League. “After a while, you don’t hear the noise because it’s not important.”
Tinnitus sufferers should beware of untrustworthy therapies. Because tinnitus is now almost a folk illness, there are numerous treatments whose efficacy has not been proven. The more fantastic the promises of a complete cure, the more sceptical one should be.
