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Comment by ghastmaster | Hacker News Reader

I've been following frequency therapeutics as well. I don't think the Neuromod treatment would provide much help to me. My tinnitus does not bother me in any meaningful way. The bothersome thing for me is hearing loss. Noisy environments interfere with my ability to hear conversation. Some frequencies I simply cannot hear. Some noises, cheap/bad audio in the higher frequencies for instance, actually hurt my ears. When the hair clippers get close to my ear, it is nearly painful. A lot of people think that is odd because hearing loss should mean I don't hear it. As a musician and audio lover, I would pay a relatively large amount of money to have normal hearing.

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I was in a T-bone accident where another car hit me centered right in between the driver and passenger doors. My left ear now has tinnitus, and I too have a hard time hearing conversation in large groups of people. However, after the wreck, I visited hearing specialist several times. I always passed their tests of the faint frequencies. They cannot explain where the ringing originates.?!?! It's one of those things it is hard to get a doctor to believe you since they can't actually see anything wrong. No broken bones, no lacerations, not bruising, nothing. Just ringing that they cannot hear.

TMJ can cause tinnitus; specifically there is a nerve connecting your jaw to the areas near your ear. Damage to this nerve, e.g., caused by years of unmitigated clenching/grinding at night or by an injury, can cause this. A neurologist may help suggest some tests. In the case of TMJ, there's a specific CT scan that will identify damaged cartilage below the ear that is typically linked to tinnitus.

TMJ was the cause of about 7% of my migraine. Watched a few YouTube videos, self massages for a few days. Found a spot that was super painful. Once it released, Migraines mostly gone.

can you link the videos that worked for you?

Might be the bob and brad physio videos. Not op, but was looking at this recently and they have some of the most prominent ones.

Yea those are really good ones.

For most topics I recommend dr Jo as a starting point Bob and Brad if they want to step up the game.

thanks!

When you say “unmitigated” do you mean via a mouth guard or something else?

I clench, have a mouth guard, but still clench. Don’t know of other treatments but would love to find one. I have tinnitus either as a result or from a bike accident which hurt my jaw and started the clenching.

I have mild tinnitus. When I move my jaw forward the sound intensives strongly, and then fades when my jaw relaxes. So there is definitely a connection for me.

This is not too unusual. For me if I jut my jaw forward, it temporarily increases the noise also.

Wow, it actually makes mine slightly quieter, or possibly of a deeper timbre.

I have heard that it can be likened to phantom limb syndrome: the brain is over-compensating for missing stimulation by creating it

On the off chance that this helps: I get tinnitus when my neck and/or jaw are clenched. This is a known phenomenon, you can google it. In fact, the onset of tinnitus is sometimes the only thing that makes me aware of how tense my neck is. If you were in a collision, it's possible your nervous system as adopted a pattern of muscle tension to compensate, or in anticipation of trauma, or something. Anyway, perhaps try relaxing your neck/head/jaw when this happens?

I appreciate the suggestion. I do have a bit of aftershock (I avoid calling it PTSD) where if I'm sitting waiting for a left turn where will I suddenly get a weird flinch feeling without actually flinching.

For me, the ringing is only noticeable when it is quiet, so bed time is annoying. I run a small fan for the white noise to compensate. Other times of the day, music is playing while I'm working (not headphones).

Just because it's not been mentioned in the other comments thus far: Car crashes are loud. And it's worse if you don't see it coming (so that you could "prepare" your ears).

Yeah, totally blind sided by it, so I never saw it coming. Someone tried to pass me on the left while I was turning left with my turn signal on (it was still flashing after the fact according to the police report). It was a 2 lane FM road in a double solid line. I also had a side impact airbag that deployed, so no telling how loud that was as well. Thankful for it, as it prevented all of the shattered glass from flying into the car and my face.

I spent a weekend with my east texas relatives shooting pumpkins with big guns and my hearing has not recovered since that was like 15 years ago...

For me it was using a nail gun once after forgetting to put on the ear protectors. That was 10 years ago. The ringing in the ear closest to the nail gun is constant and sometimes annoying, but mostly which I can subconsciously filter out.

Took me a while to understand based on my own hearing loss that it's not about decreased sensitivity to sound. Hearing is about sound volumes that occur between two limits: The threshold of sensitivity (above which you discern that the sound exists), and the threshold of pain (above which the sound is painful). Between those limits lies hearing.

In age-related "hearing loss," the threshold of sensitivity rises while the threshold of pain stays the same or even decreases slightly. So the range of volumes you can comfortably discern becomes narrower. This explains why simply increasing the volume often does more harm than good. What's really needed to treat hearing loss is frequency-specific volume compression.

Of course prolonged exposure to loud sounds which are not explicitly painful can still cause hearing damage.

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