Is tinnitus driving you mad? Hearing aids may be able to help with tinnitus, giving you the relief you crave.
If you suffer from tinnitus, you’ll most likely do or try anything to get some relief from the infernal and incessant ringing or buzzing in your ears that can interfere with many aspects of your life. The condition can be extremely irritating and cause havoc with your communication with other people, your concentration and focus at work and even your sleep — leaving you tired, irritable and depressed.
It’s a pervasive problem, affecting 10% of the British population, or around 660,000 people, and about half of people who suffer from tinnitus in the UK find it “severely distressing” and suffer further with stress, insomnia and hearing problems, according to research by the British Tinnitus Association. The number afflicted with the condition is set to soar by over 500,000 by the end of the decade, the study says, and more than 1 million people see their GPs every year in an attempt to find a remedy.
“Unfortunately, many people who visit their GPs to try and do something about their tinnitus are dismissed and just “told they have to get on with it”, according to the association — that’s something many of our patients here at Regain Hearing are all too familiar with. “We already know that, sadly, many GPs here in the UK simply don’t understand tinnitus and how it can be managed”, the association added.
Seeking Solutions for Tinnitus
While there’s no actual cure for tinnitus, there are steps you can take to try to alleviate the nonstop noise in your head and give yourself some respite. As tinnitus is connected with your hearing — it’s happening in your ears, after all — and you may have difficulty hearing because of it, it’s natural to wonder if hearing aids might be a good solution. But do hearing aids help tinnitus or just mask the noise by boosting the sounds of your environment?
If you’re unsure if you have tinnitus and it hasn’t been diagnosed, you may have it if you experience ongoing noise in the inner part of your ear or head and it lasts more than five minutes at a time and you have it more than once a week. It may be so mild that you barely notice it or it could be moderate, making you feel increasingly irritated by it — or tinnitus can be severe and dramatically impacts your life, as we mentioned above.
You may think you have no problems with your hearing, and so it might surprise you to learn that tinnitus is almost always connected with some degree of hearing loss. It can be due to the ageing process or damage that your ears have suffered, perhaps because of frequent exposure to high levels of noise. Because of this, it’s worthwhile having your hearing checked out and seeing if hearing aids might help with your tinnitus as well as your overall hearing.
How Hearing Aids Can Help Tinnitus
Hearing aids work by amplifying the sounds around you and delivering them to your inner ear, and so they’re an effective solution to different levels of hearing loss, from mild to profound. When people have problems with their hearing, the brain is not receiving all the many sounds it’s used to and it changes the way it processes various frequencies, giving rise to what we call tinnitus. Having the ability to hear properly again, with the help of hearing aids for tinnitus, can go a long way towards restoring how your brain used to process sound and may get rid of some of the ringing in your ears.
In a survey carried out a while back, the majority of tinnitus patients who took part (60%) said they experienced some degree of relief by using tinnitus hearing aids, and 22% said their tinnitus was significantly reduced.
In recent years, specific devices have entered the market, designed to target various tinnitus sounds and directly combat them. These can be recreational, calming sounds like ocean waves, rain, chimes, or customised specific masking noises. Results can be largely attributed to the audiologist responsible, if you can find one who specialises, but many wearers experience significant relief.
In addition to using hearing aids to help the brain process sound better, they can also help with tinnitus by effectively masking over the ringing and buzzing of tinnitus by boosting the volume of sound around you — you hear it so well that you no longer hear the sounds of tinnitus. So if you’ve been battling tinnitus for a while and it’s driving you mad, it might be a good idea to see your local audiologist, for a hearing test and possibly having hearing aids fitted.
Book a consultation today with the experts at Regain Hearing, your private ear clinic in London and get a test to determine your level of hearing and get relief from tinnitus.
