The AudioNotch Tinnitus Treatment Blog

There’s quite a few posts on-line claiming that actress Neve Campbell suffers from tinnitus, but I haven’t been able to find anything solid. Sufficed to say there’s quite a few articles on the subject, none substantial.

What explains the preoccupation with celebrities having the same illnesses we do?

I think it’s a psychological phenomenon. When we experience suffering, we don’t want to be alone. We want to know that others have run through the same hurdles we have. And knowing this humanizes our pain, in that it draws it out from our shoulders alone and spreads it over the shoulders of many.

If … Continue Reading

From our FAQ, an explanation of an evidence backed form of tinnitus sound therapy:

What is Tailor-Made Notched Sound Therapy?

Tailor-Made Notched Sound Therapy is a tinnitus treatment that lowers the volume of your tinnitus, and in doing so, reduces the pain and distress caused by the disease. There is no miracle tinnitus cure, however Tailor-Made notched sound therapy is a tinnitus treatment that can offer relief. It takes two forms: Tailor-Made Notched Music, or Tailor-Made Notched White Noise.

It is created by taking either music or “white noise”, and removing sound energy—”notching it out”—at … Continue Reading

In order to burn a personalized masking CD for tinnitus, follow these steps:

1. Download tinnitus masking sounds from our masker here
2. Burn them onto a CD

Viola! You’re done!

Here’s an interview where Barbra Streisand talks about her tinnitus:

There’s something important about this anecdote: Streisand acquired tinnitus years before her singing career, and despite that, became tremendously successful.

This isn’t to disparage the very real, and individually variable suffering of tinnitus patients, but to acknowledge that this suffering can be overcome with the right tools.

It’s interesting that unlike most musicians with tinnitus, Streisand’s doesn’t appear to have been caused by noise induced hearing loss (and from the interview, it sounds like she has an element of hyperacusis symptoms as well).

The trouble with anecdotes is that you can use them to prove anything. As in, literally – anything. The scientific method came out of the realization that proving causality (i.e. A causes B) couldn’t be done from anecdotes alone. Teasing out the causality from a single linear sequence of events is logically impossible, since you don’t know what was merely correlation or incidental in causing subsequent changes.

The flip-side is that testimonials – a sales tactic that has been proven to be effective and even studied for its efficacy – are a terrible form of evidence.

That in mind, here’s another story that … Continue Reading

There are multiple tinnitus clinics available in Toronto. If you’re in the Toronto area, you may want to check some of them out!

DISCLOSURE: We are not affiliated with any of these clinics and do not receive any funds from them for any reason.

The clinics are as follows:

• YorkVille Audiology
• Canadian Tinnitus and HyperAcusis Centre

It’s difficult to find specialized tinnitus treatment centres. In Toronto, although there are a lot of audiology clinics, there are few specialized tinnitus centres.

Meniere’s disease is an oftentimes debilitating condition that can cause bouts of intense vertigo, tinnitus, and hearing loss.

Ryan Adams, a billboard top 100 singer, details his harrowing experience with this illness in US magazine:

UsMagazine.com: Your last album of brand new material was Cardinology (with your band, The Cardinals) in 2008. Why the time off?

Ryan Adams: I did my last live shows in March 2009, but I was really suffering from an inner ear disease called Meniere’s disease and all the stuff that goes along with it, which is a lot of vertigo, … Continue Reading

Some users seek us out requesting help with AudioNotch by having their tinnitus frequency determined by an audiologist.

To do so,

1. Request a tinnitus evaluation that includes an evaluation of your tinnitus frequency. Some, but not all, audiologists provide this frequency matching as a service.
2. Plug the value in hZ that you receive into our system, and proceed normally.

Simply manually enter the tone you receive from your audiologist (this is your … Continue Reading

I’ve written a post that discusses the tones of tinnitus. Some of these tones are available for download (click on the first link in the post!).

Written for all you cats looking to download sounds that sound like your tinnitus (according to HitTail, you’re out there!).

If you want to do something useful with tinnitus tones, however, why not try using our free tuner, which can help you to determine the frequency of your tinnitus?

Lidocaine patches are sometimes used for pain analgesia, such as for diabetic neuropathic pain. They can be applied locally to the skin and then diffuse into the affected area. There have been reports that intravenous administration of lidocaine can relieve tinnitus temporarily, but lidocaine isn’t the kind of drug that’s safe to be providing intravenously (hence the suggestion of a local system of administration, like a patch). However, I doubt that the patch would effectively diffuse into the cochlea (and I’m not even sure if the site of action is the cochlea itself or the actual CNS – i.e. the … Continue Reading