At one point or another in your life you’ve most likely heard some ringing in your ears. And that ringing has a name: tinnitus. According to most studies, 15-20% of people experience tinnitus at any given time. Usually, it’s fleeting. But chronic tinnitus, a ringing that won’t go away, can be uncomfortable and disconcerting. The most prevalent treatment for tinnitus is, thankfully, relatively simple: hearing aids.
Dealing With Chronic Tinnitus
Some of the many reasons why tinnitus happens are pretty simple to understand, others not as much. Your ears can produce an uncountable number of noises when you have tinnitus not only ringing but sounds like thumping or grinding.
The noisier and more extreme the sounds are, the more intrusive tinnitus tends to get. Over time, tinnitus can cause declines in mental health, create trouble communicating, and interfere with your daily life.
Tinnitus And Hearing Aids
While there is often no way to cure the root cause of tinnitus, hearing aids have become pretty skilled at addressing tinnitus symptoms. There are several ways that hearing aids achieve this.
Making The Ringing in Your Ears Harder to Notice
Tinnitus and hearing loss commonly manifest together. They can have the same underlying cause or not. But it’s very likely that your tinnitus will worsen as your hearing loss worsens. There’s less competition, and that buzzing or ringing can really stand out (it’s like winning American Idol in a year with sub-par contestants).
Your hearing aid has the ability to turn the ambient sound of the world up. Your tinnitus will once again, to your relief, get lost in the details. This can help you focus on and enjoy the day-to-day.
Canceling Out The Noise
Clearly, overwhelming your tinnitus is not the same thing as masking your tinnitus. So to help handle your ringing and buzzing, many modern hearing aids use a kind of noise cancellation technology. We can teach you how to tune your hearing aid to emit certain white noises that help reduce your tinnitus. Essentially, by producing particular types of sound, your hearing aid can help decrease the volume of your tinnitus symptoms.
This feature isn’t provided on all hearing aids, so you’ll have to talk with us to find out what will work best for you.
There’s no cure for most forms of chronic tinnitus. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to deal with it. The buzzing, ringing, and other tinnitus-related noises will be gone and you will be able to experience a full life with hearing aids that are calibrated properly. For most people who live with tinnitus, hearing aids are a good choice.
