RNID: For deaf and hard of hearing people.

Relaxation products for tinnitus - February/March 2005

If you have tinnitus, you may find that sound therapy provides a pleasant distraction for you. For example, you may find the sound of an electric fan, running water from a tap or natural sounds such as heavy rain or waves at the beach work well.

  • Introduction

    In this review we looked at a range of products which produce similar sounds but in a convenient and controlled way. Unfortunately, we can't guarantee they will work for you, but many people do currently use them to help them relax or go to sleep.

    We looked at three product categories:

    • desktop, or bedside, sound generators
    • "relaxation" CDs
    • computer software

    We found four different desktop sound generators and three relaxation CDs from the many titles available. Computer software, which lets you listen and mix different relaxing sounds together on a computer, is a more recent innovation but we still found four different programs to compare.
     
    To help test the products, we sought the advice of hearing therapists from an audiology clinic in London. They helped with our testing and found six people for our user panel. Each of these volunteers had tinnitus and was aware of sound therapy.