dear colleagues.

It seems to me that "habituate", TRT and other fancy words seem to be taking a stranglehold on members tinnitus vocabularies. It seeems people feel that these terms are the new cool expressions to use.

Now dont get me wrong; each of you are entitled to your own opinions and if you sincerely believe that
candy floss will help your tinnitus, good luck to you.

I would just like to point out that habituate and trt and other therapies are simply a rejuggled/rebranded/renamed version of basic behavioural modification techniques, used by clinical psychologists for decades.

Behavioural modification is also known as conditioning theory.

It is essentially a psychological treatment for psychological symptomatology.

To transfer these theories to tinnitus , which to the best of my belief and knowledge is NOT a psychological problem, is both misleading and misguded.

What makes me angry is people taking advantage of tinnitus sufferers who are not in a position to evaluate academic material for themselves and who, by the nature of their distress and pain, are all to willing to grasp any straw available to them.

This is not a criticism of my fellow members. On the contrary it is a plea to be very very carefull as to what you read and what you take on board , without the benefit of sound scientific evidence.

I repeat my essential argument: Until a cause of tinnitus is clearly established, research into finding a cure for tinnitus is a waste of time, and is more than likely to encourage the snake oil man to flood us with more and more dubious recommendations

To offer implied hope to vulnerable people is , in my view, a disgrace.

I'm sorry you feel that way but i'll have to say that TRT and habituation probably saved my life. i developed T after nothing more than stress. no hearing damage, no brain tumors (had it all checked out by doctors and MRI's) I went through horrible anxiety, depression, etc. thought about suicide. was on xanax and antidepressants. All that until i found some information on TRT. Fact is everyone can hear T. it's been proven in studies. it's those of us with obsessive personalities who focus on it and let the brain characterize it as negative that struggle with it. some people are more succeptable to anxiety and obsessive monitoring of ANY problem. the so called worry-worts. your are correct about TRT being nothing more than modified CBT, though. but the fact is that it works. Many T sufferers are simply those of us who have underlying OCD problems or are perfectionists. those of us who have to be in control of things. we encounter T and cannot control it and then problems develop. the more we try to stop it the more significance we give to it and the brain takes over monitoring it for us. it's a classic anxiety response that the body uses to keep us alive. it's like anything else you put too much importance on and obsess about. when my T first started it was so loud an all-encompassing that i went nearly 20 days without sleep. it took over my life. After several months of TRT, however, i probably go 80% of my day without hearing it at all. i've finally let my brain realize that the sould is unimportant and my brain has stopped monitoring it.

also, most TRT sites do not try and sell anything. you do not even need to see a therapist to successfully complete TRT and get rid of T.

I agree with the last posting that TRT can be life-saving to some people. Just for the fact that you can talk to somebody, who is not going to change conversation when you talk about the 'noise'. Nevertheless, I would like to point out that a lot of people get tinnitus because they have hearing loss as well, which means that the natural noise made by the ear becomes suddenly louder than the noise in the environment. Furthermore, other people have neuroma, auditory nerve damages or otosclerosis and on top of losing some hearing, this conditions do create more noise along the auditory pathway. Obsessive personality or not, in those instances it would be hard not to focus on the tinnitus. Probably the biggest problem I see with the concept that tinnitus sufferers are self-obsessed is that doctors think that too. The patronising attitude you get when you have tinnitus is beyond belief!!! I am myself in the situation where I've lost some conductive and sensoneural hearing in one ear and have tinnitus, But because the consultant can't find the reason for the loss, he simply diagnosed me as having tinnitus and being hysterical!!!! Never mind that I almost got run over by cars several times because I couldn't hear them. It is probably simply because he wants to achieve the NHS target of not prescribing too many hearing aids.
Take care and good luck!!!

" To offer implied hope to vulnerable people is , in my view, a disgrace. "

Really?? I remember when i first got Tinnitus (though nothing more than stress) people giving me hope is what kept me going!

No-one is ever saying Tinnitus isnt real, the sounds are real, however once you realise whats going on and what the sounds ACTUALLY are its not as awful as it first seems.

Habituation is not a new fad word, its been going round for ages.

Merely by reading AND UNDERSTANDING the concept of it is enough to make most people much better (I certainly am!)

I realise now that the Tinnitus I hear (on occasion) is exactly the same sound as what I heard before I "got tinnitus". Tinnitus is the static-high pitched sound that every one has, just most dont hear it.

I use to hear it all the time, terribly.

Now I don't, and when I do (for about 0.1 percent of the day!) it doesnt affect me one bit, in fact it reassures me my auditory systems alive and kicking!
I never saw a single therapist or purchase anything I just learnt about it (TRT)

This is a suberb website

http://www.tinnitus.org/home/frame/THC1.htm (external link, opens new browser window)

Sano, If you dont believe the concept of what Tinnitus is (as descibed by TRT) what exactly DO YOU think it is!

mark. txs for post. I wish i knew the answer to your
question.I honestly do. My critique of TRt is, as iv already said, that it is based on a clinical psychology methodology ie behaviour modification. In my view tinnitus is not a psychological problem, so why use pscho treatments on it.

I accept your view that if something helps , go for it, and im pleased that yours has gone away.

But in this sea of gobbeldegoook that surrounds tinnitus, from ent consultants who deny its existance to so called therapists offering new treatments/solutions daily, so far no one has shown scientifically what is the primary cause or causes of tinnitus.

I repeat for the last time my essential argument, until a cause is found, there can be no scientific effective cure/treatment.

I THINK ( no hard evidence) that tinnitus noise stems from a failure somewhere in the auditory cortex. A schizophrenic patient who hears voices is suffering from a breakdown in his/her cognitive processes and the thoughts get transferred into the audiotory system; hence the hearing of voices..

Your pc cant play certain audio/.video files sometimes because it hasnt got the correct codecs. So im inching slowly to wards thinking, that tinnitus noise results from damage to the adiocortex resulting in the brain being unable to play/understand certain noises because of a faulty codec , so it simply transmits a standard buzz of schoosh or whatever .it goes into default mode.
gee i hope you can follow my thinking here

finally i beg to disagree that tinnitus is the high pitched sound that every one has. the tinnitus sound/s that people experience varies from person to person and can be experienced as all sorts of different sounds. kind regards sano

[originall posted by Sano55]
....so far no one has shown scientifically what is the primary cause or causes of tinnitus.

I repeat for the last time my essential argument, until a cause is found, there can be no scientific effective cure/treatment.

I THINK ( no hard evidence) that tinnitus noise stems from a failure somewhere in the auditory cortex. [/Quote]

Actually IMO you've hit the nail on the head there. It's probably related to a cochlear or retro-cochlear lesion. There's no proper studies on this except for the fact that 50% of people with a hearing loss report tinnitus.

Here's my interpretation: the cochlear performs two fairly distinct but linked functions, initial decoding and tuning/amplification. The inner and outer hair cells perform differently here. The OHC detect the initial resonance and report to the brain, then the IHC are triggered into manipulating their surrounding structures (afferent nerve action) to sharpen this signal at a particlar resonant point allowing greater interpretation by the OHC.

Imagine your OHC are damaged/dead or sending the wrong signal, it may still be possible for the afferent action to trigger the IHC establishing a 'sound' for the OHC to listen to. The harder you listen, the louder the sound is, the more stimulants in your body, ditto , being tired, ditto: the absence of another noise double ditto.

IMO TRT is effective because it breaks the vicious circle of tinnitus/insomnia/depression etc: you can't deny anybody this treatment if it is effective.

Im sorry but I strongly disagree with your believe its damaged cochlear hairs, this is what I beleived it was to begin with, but be logical about it, its hardly likely that evolution evolved us over millions of years just so that if one of the 60,000 or so hairs malfunctions it can lead us to distraction and drive us crazy, they die all the time anyway!

I believe the concept of what Tinnitus is is explained perfectly well by TRT websites.
Therefore I strongly disagree with - "so far no one has shown scientifically what is the primary cause or causes of tinnitus" comment.

The Jastreboff method (TRT) explains it perfectly well.
Dont overcomplicate Tinnitus, theres no point.


I challenge you to ask me a question about T that the Jastreboff method cannot explain.

Go On!.....

Mark, don't apologise! its good to have a healthy debate about things like this!

Jastreboff provides an elegant well argued theory for the root of the problem. In my humble opinion it still doesn't deal with some aspects of Tinnitus. Also IMHO it doesn't illustrate why (seen through fMRI) the brain also appears to 'hear' those sounds

It's not just 'damaged cochlear hairs' though one in two people with that report tinnitus, it's the brain-cochlear control loop again IMO. Hence my comment either 'related to a cochlear or retro-cochlear lesion': retro-cochlear in this instance means further up the hearing chain towards the auditory cortex.

Hence from a TRT/Jastreboff based based paper: http://www.worksafebc.com/health_care_providers/Assets/PDF/tinnitus_retraining_therapy.pdf (external link, opens new browser window)

'Thus, the neurophysiologic model considers problematic tinnitus to be caused by an aberrant auditory signal that has been conditioned to cause activation of the limbic and or autonomic nervous systems.'

An aberrant auditory signal developed at a cochlear or retro-cochlear level as above.