The AudioNotch Tinnitus Treatment Blog
Why Hope?
Why hope?
It’s a simple question.
Despite the best efforts of medical science, and despite the existence of treatments that can lessen your suffering, there still exists no cure for tinnitus.
I regularly get e-mails from people who have slipped into despair. They tell me that they can’t sleep because of the noise. They tell me they can’t relax for even a couple minutes because of the fire alarm going off inside their head. They tell me that they’re depressed, cornered, trapped by their illness. They tell me they can’t work, or concentrate.
Most of all, they tell me they have no hope.
They think about silence all day long. They think about how incredible it would be to get back something that the average person takes for granted: peace and quiet.
I’m not writing to you today to talk about this or that treatment that’s “on the horizon” or that’s “nearly passed clinical trials.” When the scientifically researched, evidence based cure for tinnitus arrives, everyone will know about it. It’ll be so effective that it won’t need any type of marketing. The fact is, solving tinnitus involves selectively fixing aberrant neurological circuits within the brain (or developing effective stem cell transplantation of hearing cells into adult humans). A cure is years away.
But you’re in pain now.
I know. I get it. I was there too.
I can’t cure your tinnitus today. The fact is, no one can (with the exception of tinnitus caused by treatable secondary causes like high blood pressure, etc.).
What I can give to you is hope. What I can give to you is encouragement. I can tell you that you’ve got to take it one day at a time. Life is hard on everyone and we all have our struggles. Fate has decided that this will be yours. You may not be able to control the existence of your tinnitus, but you can control how you react to it. You can control how to cope with it. You can treat difficulties with mood and sleep, lessening your pain. You can decide that you won’t let this illness defeat you, and that you’re going to go on and fight for the things in life that you care about. You can decide that you’re not going to let it stop you.
Hope is necessary to keep going. Hope is what’s going to keep you alive, and pull you out of this pit of misery.
Here’s an eighteenth century Frenchman, describing his tinnitus:
…a great noise started up in my ears, a noise that was triple or rather quadruple, compounded of a low and muffled humming, a softer murmuring as though of running water, a piercing whistle…This internal noise was so loud that it robbed me of the keen ear I had previously enjoyed and made me, not completely deaf, but hard of hearing… in spite of the throbbing in my arteries and the humming in my ears, which since that time, some thirty years ago now, have never left me for a moment…
Who was that man? He was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A Frenchman whose political philosophy shaped the French revolution and changed the arc of history.
I know you’re in pain. I know it hurts. So do me a favour, okay?
Keep your chin up, and don’t let it stop you.
If you’re interested in sound therapy for tinnitus check out AudioNotch.com. We offer a service to treat tinnitus and ringing ears through sound therapy online. If you have any questions feel free to contact us.