The AudioNotch Tinnitus Treatment Blog

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 reads like an advertisement for some kind of tinnitus sound therapy variant, even though it’s not acknowledged as such (check out the Daily Mail UK) for about 10,000 more of these):

Janice, 63, a retired library assistant, had started to notice the noise after she fell ill last year with a totally unrelated spinal problem and was given powerful drugs.

Doctors suspect, although they cannot be sure, that some of the medicines she received may have triggered the debilitating problem.

“I couldn’t get to sleep for ages and when I eventually did I would be woken several times in the night by this constant noise,” says Janice, from Wingerworth, near Chesterfield, Derbyshire.

“During the day I was exhausted and could no longer concentrate on anything. Reading a book was impossible and I just didn’t want to go out anywhere. It was awful.”

But within a few months her life was back on track again thanks to a highly specialised treatment which is helping some tinnitus sufferers cope with the condition.

It’s called desensitisation therapy and works by helping the patient to learn to live with the noise rather than try to shut it out. This stops the brain focusing on it and means it no longer interrupts daily life.

“Within a few months I noticed a radical improvement,” says mother-of-two Janice, who is married to retired engineer Alan, 65.