wear earplugs

WEAR EARPLUGS every time you go to a concert and be careful in recording studios.

My tinnitus gets so bad sometimes i can't even handle it. it drives me absolutely nuts. tonight to the point of tears.

I always research it, hoping somebody found a way to cure it. there's nothing. the cells in my inner ear got destroyed and i can't get them back.

from http://www.stopsnoringnewyork.com/nyc_snoring_doctor/tinnitus_treatments_newyork.htm:

"Inner Ear: This is usually the site of most cases of persistent tinnitus. The delicate nerve endings (hair cells) that detect the vibrations of sound in the fluid of the inner ear are readily injured or destroyed by insults such as loud noise, blows to the hear, certain viral infections, certain medicines, such as aspirin) and once they are lost they are not replaced. Over a person’s lifetime, the gradual destruction of these fragile cells leads to a progressive hearing loss with age (presbycusis) that is frequently accompanied by tinnitus. It seems that the decreased input from the sensory cell allows the nerve activity to be unregulated, and the brain interprets this as a sound. This is the tinnitus that the patient perceives. It is the inner ear tinnitus that is so hard to treat because we cannot restore the missing hair cells. The only way this will be fully cured is to regenerate these cells with stem cell treatment.

Nevertheless, anything and everything has been tried, but there is NO treatment that is truly successful. Lidocaine might temporarily reduce tinnitus though its reduction of nerve activity, but it has to be given intravenously. Lipoflavinoids have been touted as helpful, but are scientifically unproven. Melatonin has also been touted as being helpful. The main problem with tinnitus is that its constant presence emotionally upsets the patient and forces the sufferer to concentrate on the sound itself, thus making it seem louder and louder. This is the same thing that happens with pain, and tinnitus can be rightfully considered a kind of pain. Methods of reducing the brain’s focus on the sound are therefore helpful: biofeedback, anxiety reducing drugs, yoga and meditation. While they don’t eliminate the tinnitus, these techniques make it less bothersome so that the suffering is reduced. Another helpful treatment is to give an external sound in the ear to “mask” the tinnitus. This can be in the form of a noise machine, the “white noise” static from a radio, or even a fan. There are tinnitus maskers available as well that are placed in the ear and look like a hearing aid. Tinnitus Retraining Centers have also appeared in various areas and rely on retraining the patients' brains so they treat tinnitus similar to the way they treat the sound of a refrigerator in their kitchen, which they are normally not aware of, and when they do hear the sound, it is not bothersome. The method retrains reflexes involving connections of the auditory with the limbic and autonomic nervous systems, and retrains the subconscious part of the auditory pathway to block the tinnitus signal. TRT always consists of two components: intensive one-on-one directive counseling, and sound therapy, most frequently with the use of sound generators (which emit low level of broad-band noise), following a specific habituation protocol. Tinnitus should never be masked in TRT, because one can never habituate signal one cannot detect."