12 ms·

Electric shocks to the tongue can quiet chronic ringing ears

205 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

zimpenfish 6y ago
The Neuromodulator[1] on MyNoise definitely helps soothe mine - but if I just need to shock my tongue as well for an hour to get a year's relief ... sign me up. [1] https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/neuromodulationTonesGenerator.php https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/neuromodulationTonesGenera...
- ravedave5 6y ago
  I have it intermittently, back of the head drumming resolves it for me for a few hours at least until it goes away on its own for me.
- xtracto 6y ago
  Interesting. The "neural hack" sound sound they mention there is quite similar to what you get using the "tonal tinnitus therapy " android app. There is some research that playing sounds "near" the frequency of your tinnitus stimulates the ear system and helps reduce the tinnitus. That app produces pulsating sounds around your tinnitus frequencies. It's the only thing that had helped mine.
  - zimpenfish 6y ago
    Yeah, supposedly playing your normal music with a notch at your tinnitus frequency can also help. Alas, I have yet to figure out what frequency it is - tried several apps and I just can't pin it down (although to be fair, that's me rather than the apps, I have an abysmal sense of pitch.)
  - crucialfelix 6y ago
    I use one of those android apps. The crickets, fire, water settings usually hit my spot. After 30 minutes the single tone has dissolved and I get a fainter dual oscillator tinnitus. I practice finding quieter tones deeper in the sound field. This weakens the primary tones. Tinnitus is a mental process, but you can't work with it using thought or direct attention. It requires shifting lower more subtle processes. It's a form of meditation
ncmncm 6y ago
If your tinnitus changes timbre when you stress your skull, such as clenching your jaw, it means the ringing is actually physical sound being generated by ringing hair cells in your ears: a sensitive microphone could pick up the sound. By my reading of TFA, that kind of tinnitus is not relieved by this method.
- robotnikman 6y ago
  Interesting, now I know what causes my tinitus
  - monoideism 6y ago
    That’s the one kind of tinnitus that actually has the possibility of being cured, if I recall correctly (via some procedure).
- runeb 6y ago
  Do you have more information on this, links etc?
- wruza 6y ago
  Mine changes both tone and intensity only when I strain my abdomen (as you usually do in a bathroom). What does that mean? Does it depend on a blood pressure? But my bp is pretty normal and lowering it would harm other things, I guess. I also found out that tinnitus gets worse if I'm listening to it, and almost disappears when I quit giving a fuck about it. Also, if you have one, and you are subject to nervousness do not try that fingers-on-the-nape trick. It will disappear and then may return back two-three times worse for some time. Strangely, I have severe one, but don't care much. Also, it intesifies in threads like this one, probably because I'm actively thinking about it.
- jagraff 6y ago
  Do you have a source for that? I understand that there _are_ situations where your hair cells can actually start to ring noticeably (due to biofeedback mechanisms going haywire), and I've noticed that type of ring - an extremely loud, piercing sound in one ear that drowns everything out for a few minutes before going away - but I've understood that to be different than normal tinnitus, even though mine definitely responds to jaw clenching.
Reedx 6y ago
Unfortunately, no control group. So they don't know if it was a placebo effect and/or some other factor...
- derekp7 6y ago
  If I could get a prescription for some quality placebos, then I'd be on board as long as I get relief.
  - monkeycantype 6y ago
    I just sent you some, they were administered wirelessly, you're welcome.
- viraptor 6y ago
  I'm curious how one would even do control for this. The whole point of this treatment is to deliver sensations. How would you pretend delivering sensations in a way that can't be easily told from actual sensations?
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    You could pick something like shocking the fingertips. A sensation, but not one expected to quiet the chronic ringing.
  - foota 6y ago
    It might be a little much, but maybe you could numb the area? (although this might eliminate the effect...) or maybe use something like laughing gas to put the patient semi-out (you probably wouldn't want general anesthesia, since that's risky)?
- dawnerd 6y ago
  On the flip side even if it's a placebo and it helps people cope, is that necessarily a bad thing?
- tomohawk 6y ago
_fs 6y ago
I wish more work was happening in this sphere. I know I would easily pay $50k+ for even a 50/50 chance to cure my tinnitus. Its a horrible feeling to never be able to quiet your mind.
- kuzuman 6y ago
  Why don't you just stick your tongue in the wall outlet?
- ddlutz 6y ago
  I'd pay that much if it was guaranteed to cure it forever (minus any new injury that could occur). Been having it since I was 24 with a massive ear infection, it's been hell some days.
  - GioM 6y ago
    Sorry about this. It is really shitty. Like you, I got a case of tinnitus via ear infection. In my case it was caused by a three-week-long infection. However, I count myself massively lucky that it did slowly resolve over about 5 years, to the point where I’d now consider it nearly gone. I know it’s easy to lose hope, and get really frustrated by it, but I hope you have good days coming to you. Good luck.
    - ddlutz 6y ago
      Mine also lasted multiple weeks, due to doctors not taking me seriously with how bad the pain was (even though I showed up at the ER @ 4 in the morning due to waking up from intense pain), and having seen three doctors, including one ENT, getting told it's a virus, bacteria, or fungus. Maybe I'll be as lucky as you and in 2 years it'll be all gone :)
- rossdavidh 6y ago
  The article mentions that talk therapy is already an accepted treatment. Not guaranteed to help, of course, but probably that means you could get access to it (for a lot less than $50k, I would hope). So, worth looking into if anyone near you has done this for tinnitus.
jerhewet 6y ago
My tinnitus was caused by my blood pressure. Had a heart attack a couple of years ago, they inserted a stent and I drastically modified my bad habits (diet, exercise, all that), and the constant ringing in my ears vanished. BP now hovers around 100 / 60, resting heart rate in the 70's, and I rarely experience tinnitus any more.
- bufferoverflow 6y ago
  I got tinnitus due to some health problems caused by bad diet. Got 100% off sugars, alcohol, bread, milk products for 3 months, and most of my health problems went away. I got to warn you, stopping sugar consumption cold turkey is not easy and not nice. That stuff is like (what I imagine) crack. First two weeks were awful.
  - SkyMarshal 6y ago
    I found that replacing sugar with a Keto or Paleo (or both) diet and daily green tea, then those diets + green tea's appetite suppressant satiated me enough that I never had any sugar cravings and was able to wean myself off it relatively painlessly.
  - frutiger 6y ago
    > I got to warn you, stopping sugar consumption cold turkey is not easy and not nice. Just for another data point, when I moved to the US I did not like the taste of processed sugars in a lot of the standard supermarket food here and found it pretty trivial to give it up.
  - wruza 6y ago
    It is called keto flu, iirc. As they say, your body undergoes a metabolic transformation (it knows how to do it from evolution/genes) when you miss carbs and sugar for a while. When I found out, it was so cool that our body can just reconfigure itself for a completely different diet. That is, if it is true, of course, because the entire keto-thing seems to be surrounded by some fog and doubt, for some reason.
- ObsoleteNerd 6y ago
fudged71 6y ago
More proof to support "BrainPort"[1] tongue-computer interfaces. It is clearly a cheap and effective way to stimulate neuroplasticity. If they can give sight to the blind, balance to the unbalanced, and 3D navigation sense to Navy SEALS divers... then imagine what a low-cost tongue electrode peripheral could provide for gaming, sports, and other daily applications. Imagine a AR/VR headset wit a wire to your mouth that allowed you to sense infrared/UV spectrum without hindering your vision. Or spatial radar sensing when you are driving your car or flying a drone. Or any number of inputs in a game. Maybe providing an extra sense of balance could even help espace the VR nausea problem. The applications of this simple low-cost tech are astounding, and helping with tinnitus is icing on the cake. Who is willing to build this? A 16x16 electrode grid peripheral for phones, computers, VR? [1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/can-you-see-with-your-tongue https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/can-you-see-with-your-...
- jameslk 6y ago
  I hadn't heard of BrainPort until you mentioned it, but it sounds pretty interesting. It hasn't been discussed much on HN either (in the past 6 years at least[0]). Others may find it interesting too if you submitted your article 0. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=BrainPort&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- sjg007 6y ago
  This sounds amazing.
fallingfrog 6y ago
This efficacy of this treatment just seems wildly improbable to me. You zap a person’s tongue and then play a bunch of random frequencies in their ears and it cures tinnitus? Why? What’s the mechanism? Can someone who understands neurology explain how this works? I mean some of the reasoning in the article is so hand-wavy. Like, saying that stimulating the tongue stimulates the brain. No shit, stimulating any nerve stimulates the part of the brain that feels touch in that nerve. I don’t buy it.
- Lordarminius 6y ago
  There are a lot of things that cannot be explained in neurology like why salt on the tongue eases the pain of pepper in your eyes or how some people sleep with their eyes open. There are a lot of what I like to call 'cross-connections' in our biology that defy logic as we know it. These I suspect, are the foundation for acupuncture (not that I espouse it).
- _Microft 6y ago
  It's an article summarizing the work for the broader public. If you are interested in the details, you have got to read the actual paper. https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/12/564/eabb2830 https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/12/564/eabb2830
- lr4444lr 6y ago
  There is a well accepted theory that tinnitus is a kind of pathological rewiring of the circuits in the brain that give rise to the sensation of sound. Whether this is compensatory for hearing loss (i.e., higher noise that your brain accepts in order to get more signal) or purely pathological is an open question, but it does sound reasonable that electric stimulation applied concurrently with sound stimulus could rectify some of the issue. I don't know how they'd determine which tones or regions to stimulate though.
- UniverseHacker 6y ago
  We know very little about how the human nervous system actually works. Virtually all psychiatric illnesses and treatments lack any known mechanism- yet that doesn't prevent us from discovering effective treatments.
ldarby 6y ago
> Further testing in guinea pigs revealed the best body parts to stimulate to shut off tinnitus How on earth do they know if guinea pigs have tinnitus and if this method shut it off in them?
- ldarby 6y ago
  Oh this is bloody awful: > we developed a guinea pig model of tinnitus induced by noise exposure ... > choosing a stimulus interval known to induce long-term depression (LTD). Twenty minutes per day of LTD-inducing bimodal (but not unimodal) stimulation reduced physiological and behavioral evidence of tinnitus in the guinea pigs https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/10/422/eaal3175 https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/10/422/eaal3175 I'm not anti-science and I understand the need for animal testing to reduce risks to humans but this raises serious ethical concerns where no such risk to humans exists.
  - ldarby 6y ago
    It still doesn't even make sense. How does something that "induces long term depression" have a separate effect of "reduces evidence of tinnitus"? Are they saying this stimulation that apparently cures tinnitus also causes depression?
    - armatav 6y ago
      Dudes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_depression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_depression
      - ldarby 6y ago
        Ok, TIL, I thought it was cronic depression. But still, I see no reason to risk causing actual cronic depression via repeated noise trauma.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
agumonkey 6y ago
from my short trip in pills I have a few hints that the tongue has wires pretty deep in the mind
carabiner 6y ago
I really want one much stronger, but applied to my heart.
m463 6y ago
I remember reading of a way to stop tinnitus where you blocked your ears and thwacked your skull with a finger. It sort of worked (I wonder if it just stunned my ears?) ok, here is a version of it: > 1) Place the palms of your hands over your ears so your fingers wrap around the back of your head. > 2) Set your middle fingers on the top of your neck right at the base of your skull. > 3) Put your index fingers on top of your middle fingers and apply pressure. > 4) Now snap them on the back of your head over and over like you’re drumming. > 5) Repeat it about 50 times. > Ideally, when you pull your hands away, you won’t hear any ringing, hissing, or buzzing anymore. https://lifehacker.com/this-weird-trick-might-give-you-brief-relief-from-your-1794093023 https://lifehacker.com/this-weird-trick-might-give-you-brief...
- DigitallyFidget 6y ago
  I use this when it's distracting the hell out of me, but usually it's just a minor background noise that I barely notice because it is perpetually there. I've never sought to do anything about it because I'm just used to it and so few things trigger it to get loud that it's generally not annoying. When it does get triggered and loud, it's the same volume as a normal talking voice, but it's pretty rare.
  - 8fingerlouie 6y ago
    Mine is the same. I have no actual confirmation as to why it's there, other than the fact that i just noticed it one day i was staying in a hotel, and it's been there ever since. That was 10+ years ago. I assume it's the "usual" causes, too much loud music and decades of riding my motorbike with crappy helmets, though mine is not caused by hearing loss. Normally it's just a slight ringing that i hardly notice if there is other stuff going on, but when i get stressed, or slouch in my office chair, it can gain volume in the evening. I've learned to "ignore" mine. As i'm typing this i'm very aware of it because i'm "focusing on it", but when i'm doing work, watching tv, or even walking the dog i don't notice it. I find it to be the most annoying when i'm trying to listen to quiet tv, or trying to fall asleep. What i normally do is try to focus on some other background noise. Rain falling on a window, my wife or dog breathing. This usually makes it "go away" for long enough that i'm not annoyed by it anymore. Fun fact, ANC headphones will make mine disappear which makes absolutely no sense as the noise is non audible, so there's no noise for the headphones to cancel, and yet it goes away, or at least becomes inaudible.
Klonoar 6y ago
Tinnitus is not necessarily caused by one specific thing - for instance, it can be from: - Hearing loss and/or age - Blood pressure - TMJ (jaw/dental issues) - Posture issues There's a company in Ireland (Neuromod, I think) that has a product like this that seems to be able to work for some tinnitus sufferers, but not all - possibly owing to the differing types. FX322 is a hearing-loss drug that works via stem cells and has shown promising results in treating the hearing loss angle. If yours is TMJ or blood pressure, though... you need an entirely different plan of attack. Posting this comment mostly because I really get tired of reading threads where this isn't acknowledged; no one cure fits all. I've had it since I was a child and while habituation does factor in slightly, I think wider understanding of this all needs to be out there.
- novok 6y ago
  I went to an audiologist and an MD for my spontaneously developed tinnitus in my 30s. They did a hearing test, asked a couple of questions that didn't apply to me and they both said "I dunno why you have it" and were fairly useless. The only hint was a dip in a hearing chart, which wasn't big enough to be considered hearing loss or otherwise. This list alone is a better list of potential causes than those useless doctors.
  - iv42 6y ago
    Standard audiometry, usually, only produces a test that goes up to 8 kHz (functional speech recognition). An extended high frequency audiometry may, or may not be more revealing as it can go higher. It would have no bearing on your medical treatment though.
  - tim333 6y ago
    Tinnitus sufferer here who's read up a bit. I think the situation is no one knows rather than "those useless doctors" in particular. Still trial and error on possible treatments may get somewhere. I've found for me ear plugs when sounds go much over 90db help - I've got a db app on the phone.
hoppersoft 6y ago
Tinnitus sufferer here. How can I get in on this?
- candlemas 6y ago
  I'm going to try licking a 9 volt battery.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    Lol, be sure and try side, back, underside for the full experience. Sidebar: Having done this as a kid, I ended up being able to taste polarity. Hold one wire with finger, taste other and the polarity affects the "taste" sensation. And I realize I don't really have words to describe what it is like.
brandonmenc 6y ago
Since this seems to be a personal anecdote thread: I have constant tinnitus, ever since I was a child. I grew up thinking everyone heard that high pitched buzzing. A recent hearing check showed I have better than average hearing for my age. I have TMJ disorder, but I didn't (I don't think) as a child. I currently subscribe to the theory that mine may be caused by like, a blood vessel by chance too close to the eardrum or whatever, and that there is nothing I can do about it. Regardless, the possible causes seem to span a wide range of things totally unrelated so everyone who didn't get it from exposure to loud sounds is on a highly personal journey.
analog31 6y ago
What I'd like to know is what 14 points means. What's that in decibels? That would tell me if it's a meaningful improvement.
- FlingPoo 6y ago
  It says right in the article: "And they saw an average drop of about 14 points on a tinnitus severity score of one to 100, the researchers report today in Science Translational Medicine"
kuiper0x2 6y ago
Large doses of antioxidants can improve tinnitus https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6950042/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6950042/ I started taking lots of antioxidants to improve immune function in an attempt to improve my chances with COVID and my tinnitus improved a lot!
- lgats 6y ago
  The antioxidant group received one multivitamin-multimineral tablet once a day with their meal and one tablet of alpha-lipoic acid [300 mg a-lipoic acid per tablet] twice a day on an empty stomach
jitendrac 6y ago
I got tinnitus in left ear 2 years ago due to sudden high frequency hearing loss, its hell like experience. I am hoping for some cure for both hearing loss and tinnitus from current running trials. Current trials whose updates I am following are fx322,pipe505 and regain project.
- mattmanser 6y ago
  It's better to learn to accept it. It used to really bug me. It's going full tilt this morning, the loudest it gets, and doesn't bother me at all.
de_watcher 6y ago
But then you get electric shocks to the tongue...
rawoke083600 6y ago
Lol how did they decide on the tongue ? Did they just started shocking random body parts ?
mattlondon 6y ago
As an aside, I am noticing a correlation to using my noise-cancelling headphones and ringing in my ears at the end of the day. Not even using them for that long - perhaps just 2 or 3 hours total spread out across the working day at "normal" volume levels for meetings (not even music) Cut out wearing QC35s for a day or two and the ringing goes away at night. Do noise-cancelling headphones from the likes of Bose et all "collapse" the sound waves via interference so that the sound waves that do reach my ear are physically lesser, or is it just merely masking noise with anti-noise, and so now I get twice the noise energy pumped into my ears even if I cannot actually hear it as much?
- oe 6y ago
  Same problem with QC15 here, to the point that I can’t use them anymore. I had to use them in our open office to get anything done but the ringing in my ears got pretty bad. Working from home and not listening to music has helped a bit.
- darkteflon 6y ago
  I’ve noticed exactly the same thing. I also use QC35s but I assume the brand and model is just a coincidence - that the noise cancelling tech itself is the culprit. I don’t have any evidence one way or another for this but very interested to read that others out there are having a similar experience.
- JoachimS 6y ago
  (Anecdote time.) I got myself Airpods Pro last autumn and used the transparent mode. After a few weeks my tinnitus had become way worse. After 3-4 months it had died down a bit (but not to what it used to be before the pods.) I then used them again for a couple of days. And it became even worse. Haven't used them for 6 months and unfortunately it is still as bad. I don't dare using them or my Bose headphones anymore. Your comment is the first I've seen relating noise cancelling with tinnitus.
  - jagged-chisel 6y ago
    You mentioned using transparent mode. It's not real transparency: there's a mic on the back/top whose input is added to the other signal coming from Bluetooth. I personally find this mode annoying af. Have you attempted noise cancelling mode? Have you attempted turning off the noise control altogether?
mozey 6y ago
I developed constant tinnitus a couple of years ago, probably from a sequence of causes: I've had sinus problems since childhood. Some exposure to loud music. An upper back spine injury that affects my neck and chest muscles. With this I sometimes had tinnitus, usually worse in the evenings or after spending many hours in front of a screen. Then I got knocked on the head twice, the second time left a small dent in my nose, and it damaged the right side of my jaw. After this the tinnitus became more permanent. Almost worse than the tinnitus is that my ears are always popping, as in many times per day. Just sitting at my desk I'll get the same sensation you get on descent when scuba diving, and I have to pinch my nose and blow on it to equalize. Any else have this symptom?
- MrGilbert 6y ago
  > Any else have this symptom? Yes. I don't have tinnitus or anything related, but I have been diagnosed with TMJD after months of visiting different doctors and therelike. At the end, my dentist had the right idea. There are a lot of factors that come into play. I also think that our bodies are simply not made for this much "sitting time". Anyhow, I have a "popping" noise when I tilt my head back and forth. I simply learned to live with it. After the last sickness, I also developed a "clogged" feeling in my left ear, with my ear doctor telling me that "everything looks fine." I also learned to live with this.
Unklejoe 6y ago
I have had tinnitus since as long as I can remember. About a year ago, it got significantly worse during a period of time which happened to align with extreme stress in my personal life. I also developed muscle fasciculations at the same time, which led to a anxiety spiral of ALS fears (turned out to be benign like most fasciculations). Anyway, I'm luckily one of the people who's able to sort of tune the tinnitus out. I pretty much forget I have it until I see an article about it...
LinuxBender 6y ago
Can the author of the article answer this? I have a tens-7000 with the ear clips. They would probably work fine on the tongue. What would I need to set the Width, Rate and Mode to in order to replicate this therapy?

205 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

The Neuromodulator[1] on MyNoise definitely helps soothe mine - but if I just need to shock my tongue as well for an hour to get a year's relief ... sign me up. [1] https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/neuromodulationTonesGenerator.php https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/neuromodulationTonesGenera...

ravedave5 6y ago
I have it intermittently, back of the head drumming resolves it for me for a few hours at least until it goes away on its own for me.
xtracto 6y ago
Interesting. The "neural hack" sound sound they mention there is quite similar to what you get using the "tonal tinnitus therapy " android app. There is some research that playing sounds "near" the frequency of your tinnitus stimulates the ear system and helps reduce the tinnitus. That app produces pulsating sounds around your tinnitus frequencies. It's the only thing that had helped mine.
- zimpenfish 6y ago
  Yeah, supposedly playing your normal music with a notch at your tinnitus frequency can also help. Alas, I have yet to figure out what frequency it is - tried several apps and I just can't pin it down (although to be fair, that's me rather than the apps, I have an abysmal sense of pitch.)
- crucialfelix 6y ago
  I use one of those android apps. The crickets, fire, water settings usually hit my spot. After 30 minutes the single tone has dissolved and I get a fainter dual oscillator tinnitus. I practice finding quieter tones deeper in the sound field. This weakens the primary tones. Tinnitus is a mental process, but you can't work with it using thought or direct attention. It requires shifting lower more subtle processes. It's a form of meditation

ncmncm 6y ago

If your tinnitus changes timbre when you stress your skull, such as clenching your jaw, it means the ringing is actually physical sound being generated by ringing hair cells in your ears: a sensitive microphone could pick up the sound. By my reading of TFA, that kind of tinnitus is not relieved by this method.

robotnikman 6y ago
Interesting, now I know what causes my tinitus
- monoideism 6y ago
  That’s the one kind of tinnitus that actually has the possibility of being cured, if I recall correctly (via some procedure).
runeb 6y ago
Do you have more information on this, links etc?
wruza 6y ago
Mine changes both tone and intensity only when I strain my abdomen (as you usually do in a bathroom). What does that mean? Does it depend on a blood pressure? But my bp is pretty normal and lowering it would harm other things, I guess. I also found out that tinnitus gets worse if I'm listening to it, and almost disappears when I quit giving a fuck about it. Also, if you have one, and you are subject to nervousness do not try that fingers-on-the-nape trick. It will disappear and then may return back two-three times worse for some time. Strangely, I have severe one, but don't care much. Also, it intesifies in threads like this one, probably because I'm actively thinking about it.
jagraff 6y ago
Do you have a source for that? I understand that there _are_ situations where your hair cells can actually start to ring noticeably (due to biofeedback mechanisms going haywire), and I've noticed that type of ring - an extremely loud, piercing sound in one ear that drowns everything out for a few minutes before going away - but I've understood that to be different than normal tinnitus, even though mine definitely responds to jaw clenching.

Reedx 6y ago

Unfortunately, no control group. So they don't know if it was a placebo effect and/or some other factor...

derekp7 6y ago
If I could get a prescription for some quality placebos, then I'd be on board as long as I get relief.
- monkeycantype 6y ago
  I just sent you some, they were administered wirelessly, you're welcome.
viraptor 6y ago
I'm curious how one would even do control for this. The whole point of this treatment is to deliver sensations. How would you pretend delivering sensations in a way that can't be easily told from actual sensations?
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  You could pick something like shocking the fingertips. A sensation, but not one expected to quiet the chronic ringing.
- foota 6y ago
  It might be a little much, but maybe you could numb the area? (although this might eliminate the effect...) or maybe use something like laughing gas to put the patient semi-out (you probably wouldn't want general anesthesia, since that's risky)?
dawnerd 6y ago
On the flip side even if it's a placebo and it helps people cope, is that necessarily a bad thing?
tomohawk 6y ago

_fs 6y ago

I wish more work was happening in this sphere. I know I would easily pay $50k+ for even a 50/50 chance to cure my tinnitus. Its a horrible feeling to never be able to quiet your mind.

kuzuman 6y ago
Why don't you just stick your tongue in the wall outlet?
ddlutz 6y ago
I'd pay that much if it was guaranteed to cure it forever (minus any new injury that could occur). Been having it since I was 24 with a massive ear infection, it's been hell some days.
- GioM 6y ago
  Sorry about this. It is really shitty. Like you, I got a case of tinnitus via ear infection. In my case it was caused by a three-week-long infection. However, I count myself massively lucky that it did slowly resolve over about 5 years, to the point where I’d now consider it nearly gone. I know it’s easy to lose hope, and get really frustrated by it, but I hope you have good days coming to you. Good luck.
  - ddlutz 6y ago
    Mine also lasted multiple weeks, due to doctors not taking me seriously with how bad the pain was (even though I showed up at the ER @ 4 in the morning due to waking up from intense pain), and having seen three doctors, including one ENT, getting told it's a virus, bacteria, or fungus. Maybe I'll be as lucky as you and in 2 years it'll be all gone :)
rossdavidh 6y ago
The article mentions that talk therapy is already an accepted treatment. Not guaranteed to help, of course, but probably that means you could get access to it (for a lot less than $50k, I would hope). So, worth looking into if anyone near you has done this for tinnitus.

jerhewet 6y ago

My tinnitus was caused by my blood pressure. Had a heart attack a couple of years ago, they inserted a stent and I drastically modified my bad habits (diet, exercise, all that), and the constant ringing in my ears vanished. BP now hovers around 100 / 60, resting heart rate in the 70's, and I rarely experience tinnitus any more.

bufferoverflow 6y ago
I got tinnitus due to some health problems caused by bad diet. Got 100% off sugars, alcohol, bread, milk products for 3 months, and most of my health problems went away. I got to warn you, stopping sugar consumption cold turkey is not easy and not nice. That stuff is like (what I imagine) crack. First two weeks were awful.
- SkyMarshal 6y ago
  I found that replacing sugar with a Keto or Paleo (or both) diet and daily green tea, then those diets + green tea's appetite suppressant satiated me enough that I never had any sugar cravings and was able to wean myself off it relatively painlessly.
- frutiger 6y ago
  > I got to warn you, stopping sugar consumption cold turkey is not easy and not nice. Just for another data point, when I moved to the US I did not like the taste of processed sugars in a lot of the standard supermarket food here and found it pretty trivial to give it up.
- wruza 6y ago
  It is called keto flu, iirc. As they say, your body undergoes a metabolic transformation (it knows how to do it from evolution/genes) when you miss carbs and sugar for a while. When I found out, it was so cool that our body can just reconfigure itself for a completely different diet. That is, if it is true, of course, because the entire keto-thing seems to be surrounded by some fog and doubt, for some reason.
ObsoleteNerd 6y ago

fudged71 6y ago

More proof to support "BrainPort"[1] tongue-computer interfaces. It is clearly a cheap and effective way to stimulate neuroplasticity. If they can give sight to the blind, balance to the unbalanced, and 3D navigation sense to Navy SEALS divers... then imagine what a low-cost tongue electrode peripheral could provide for gaming, sports, and other daily applications. Imagine a AR/VR headset wit a wire to your mouth that allowed you to sense infrared/UV spectrum without hindering your vision. Or spatial radar sensing when you are driving your car or flying a drone. Or any number of inputs in a game. Maybe providing an extra sense of balance could even help espace the VR nausea problem. The applications of this simple low-cost tech are astounding, and helping with tinnitus is icing on the cake. Who is willing to build this? A 16x16 electrode grid peripheral for phones, computers, VR? [1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/can-you-see-with-your-tongue https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/can-you-see-with-your-...

jameslk 6y ago
I hadn't heard of BrainPort until you mentioned it, but it sounds pretty interesting. It hasn't been discussed much on HN either (in the past 6 years at least[0]). Others may find it interesting too if you submitted your article 0. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=BrainPort&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
sjg007 6y ago
This sounds amazing.

fallingfrog 6y ago

This efficacy of this treatment just seems wildly improbable to me. You zap a person’s tongue and then play a bunch of random frequencies in their ears and it cures tinnitus? Why? What’s the mechanism? Can someone who understands neurology explain how this works? I mean some of the reasoning in the article is so hand-wavy. Like, saying that stimulating the tongue stimulates the brain. No shit, stimulating any nerve stimulates the part of the brain that feels touch in that nerve. I don’t buy it.

Lordarminius 6y ago
There are a lot of things that cannot be explained in neurology like why salt on the tongue eases the pain of pepper in your eyes or how some people sleep with their eyes open. There are a lot of what I like to call 'cross-connections' in our biology that defy logic as we know it. These I suspect, are the foundation for acupuncture (not that I espouse it).
_Microft 6y ago
It's an article summarizing the work for the broader public. If you are interested in the details, you have got to read the actual paper. https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/12/564/eabb2830 https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/12/564/eabb2830
lr4444lr 6y ago
There is a well accepted theory that tinnitus is a kind of pathological rewiring of the circuits in the brain that give rise to the sensation of sound. Whether this is compensatory for hearing loss (i.e., higher noise that your brain accepts in order to get more signal) or purely pathological is an open question, but it does sound reasonable that electric stimulation applied concurrently with sound stimulus could rectify some of the issue. I don't know how they'd determine which tones or regions to stimulate though.
UniverseHacker 6y ago
We know very little about how the human nervous system actually works. Virtually all psychiatric illnesses and treatments lack any known mechanism- yet that doesn't prevent us from discovering effective treatments.

ldarby 6y ago

> Further testing in guinea pigs revealed the best body parts to stimulate to shut off tinnitus How on earth do they know if guinea pigs have tinnitus and if this method shut it off in them?

ldarby 6y ago
Oh this is bloody awful: > we developed a guinea pig model of tinnitus induced by noise exposure ... > choosing a stimulus interval known to induce long-term depression (LTD). Twenty minutes per day of LTD-inducing bimodal (but not unimodal) stimulation reduced physiological and behavioral evidence of tinnitus in the guinea pigs https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/10/422/eaal3175 https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/10/422/eaal3175 I'm not anti-science and I understand the need for animal testing to reduce risks to humans but this raises serious ethical concerns where no such risk to humans exists.
- ldarby 6y ago
  It still doesn't even make sense. How does something that "induces long term depression" have a separate effect of "reduces evidence of tinnitus"? Are they saying this stimulation that apparently cures tinnitus also causes depression?
  - armatav 6y ago
    Dudes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_depression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_depression
    - ldarby 6y ago
      Ok, TIL, I thought it was cronic depression. But still, I see no reason to risk causing actual cronic depression via repeated noise trauma.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]

agumonkey 6y ago

from my short trip in pills I have a few hints that the tongue has wires pretty deep in the mind

carabiner 6y ago

I really want one much stronger, but applied to my heart.

m463 6y ago

I remember reading of a way to stop tinnitus where you blocked your ears and thwacked your skull with a finger. It sort of worked (I wonder if it just stunned my ears?) ok, here is a version of it: > 1) Place the palms of your hands over your ears so your fingers wrap around the back of your head. > 2) Set your middle fingers on the top of your neck right at the base of your skull. > 3) Put your index fingers on top of your middle fingers and apply pressure. > 4) Now snap them on the back of your head over and over like you’re drumming. > 5) Repeat it about 50 times. > Ideally, when you pull your hands away, you won’t hear any ringing, hissing, or buzzing anymore. https://lifehacker.com/this-weird-trick-might-give-you-brief-relief-from-your-1794093023 https://lifehacker.com/this-weird-trick-might-give-you-brief...

DigitallyFidget 6y ago
I use this when it's distracting the hell out of me, but usually it's just a minor background noise that I barely notice because it is perpetually there. I've never sought to do anything about it because I'm just used to it and so few things trigger it to get loud that it's generally not annoying. When it does get triggered and loud, it's the same volume as a normal talking voice, but it's pretty rare.
- 8fingerlouie 6y ago
  Mine is the same. I have no actual confirmation as to why it's there, other than the fact that i just noticed it one day i was staying in a hotel, and it's been there ever since. That was 10+ years ago. I assume it's the "usual" causes, too much loud music and decades of riding my motorbike with crappy helmets, though mine is not caused by hearing loss. Normally it's just a slight ringing that i hardly notice if there is other stuff going on, but when i get stressed, or slouch in my office chair, it can gain volume in the evening. I've learned to "ignore" mine. As i'm typing this i'm very aware of it because i'm "focusing on it", but when i'm doing work, watching tv, or even walking the dog i don't notice it. I find it to be the most annoying when i'm trying to listen to quiet tv, or trying to fall asleep. What i normally do is try to focus on some other background noise. Rain falling on a window, my wife or dog breathing. This usually makes it "go away" for long enough that i'm not annoyed by it anymore. Fun fact, ANC headphones will make mine disappear which makes absolutely no sense as the noise is non audible, so there's no noise for the headphones to cancel, and yet it goes away, or at least becomes inaudible.

Klonoar 6y ago

Tinnitus is not necessarily caused by one specific thing - for instance, it can be from: - Hearing loss and/or age - Blood pressure - TMJ (jaw/dental issues) - Posture issues There's a company in Ireland (Neuromod, I think) that has a product like this that seems to be able to work for some tinnitus sufferers, but not all - possibly owing to the differing types. FX322 is a hearing-loss drug that works via stem cells and has shown promising results in treating the hearing loss angle. If yours is TMJ or blood pressure, though... you need an entirely different plan of attack. Posting this comment mostly because I really get tired of reading threads where this isn't acknowledged; no one cure fits all. I've had it since I was a child and while habituation does factor in slightly, I think wider understanding of this all needs to be out there.

novok 6y ago
I went to an audiologist and an MD for my spontaneously developed tinnitus in my 30s. They did a hearing test, asked a couple of questions that didn't apply to me and they both said "I dunno why you have it" and were fairly useless. The only hint was a dip in a hearing chart, which wasn't big enough to be considered hearing loss or otherwise. This list alone is a better list of potential causes than those useless doctors.
- iv42 6y ago
  Standard audiometry, usually, only produces a test that goes up to 8 kHz (functional speech recognition). An extended high frequency audiometry may, or may not be more revealing as it can go higher. It would have no bearing on your medical treatment though.
- tim333 6y ago
  Tinnitus sufferer here who's read up a bit. I think the situation is no one knows rather than "those useless doctors" in particular. Still trial and error on possible treatments may get somewhere. I've found for me ear plugs when sounds go much over 90db help - I've got a db app on the phone.

hoppersoft 6y ago

Tinnitus sufferer here. How can I get in on this?

candlemas 6y ago
I'm going to try licking a 9 volt battery.
- ddingus 6y ago
  Lol, be sure and try side, back, underside for the full experience. Sidebar: Having done this as a kid, I ended up being able to taste polarity. Hold one wire with finger, taste other and the polarity affects the "taste" sensation. And I realize I don't really have words to describe what it is like.

brandonmenc 6y ago

Since this seems to be a personal anecdote thread: I have constant tinnitus, ever since I was a child. I grew up thinking everyone heard that high pitched buzzing. A recent hearing check showed I have better than average hearing for my age. I have TMJ disorder, but I didn't (I don't think) as a child. I currently subscribe to the theory that mine may be caused by like, a blood vessel by chance too close to the eardrum or whatever, and that there is nothing I can do about it. Regardless, the possible causes seem to span a wide range of things totally unrelated so everyone who didn't get it from exposure to loud sounds is on a highly personal journey.

analog31 6y ago

What I'd like to know is what 14 points means. What's that in decibels? That would tell me if it's a meaningful improvement.

FlingPoo 6y ago
It says right in the article: "And they saw an average drop of about 14 points on a tinnitus severity score of one to 100, the researchers report today in Science Translational Medicine"

kuiper0x2 6y ago

Large doses of antioxidants can improve tinnitus https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6950042/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6950042/ I started taking lots of antioxidants to improve immune function in an attempt to improve my chances with COVID and my tinnitus improved a lot!

lgats 6y ago
The antioxidant group received one multivitamin-multimineral tablet once a day with their meal and one tablet of alpha-lipoic acid [300 mg a-lipoic acid per tablet] twice a day on an empty stomach

jitendrac 6y ago

I got tinnitus in left ear 2 years ago due to sudden high frequency hearing loss, its hell like experience. I am hoping for some cure for both hearing loss and tinnitus from current running trials. Current trials whose updates I am following are fx322,pipe505 and regain project.

mattmanser 6y ago
It's better to learn to accept it. It used to really bug me. It's going full tilt this morning, the loudest it gets, and doesn't bother me at all.

de_watcher 6y ago

But then you get electric shocks to the tongue...

rawoke083600 6y ago

Lol how did they decide on the tongue ? Did they just started shocking random body parts ?

mattlondon 6y ago

As an aside, I am noticing a correlation to using my noise-cancelling headphones and ringing in my ears at the end of the day. Not even using them for that long - perhaps just 2 or 3 hours total spread out across the working day at "normal" volume levels for meetings (not even music) Cut out wearing QC35s for a day or two and the ringing goes away at night. Do noise-cancelling headphones from the likes of Bose et all "collapse" the sound waves via interference so that the sound waves that do reach my ear are physically lesser, or is it just merely masking noise with anti-noise, and so now I get twice the noise energy pumped into my ears even if I cannot actually hear it as much?

oe 6y ago
Same problem with QC15 here, to the point that I can’t use them anymore. I had to use them in our open office to get anything done but the ringing in my ears got pretty bad. Working from home and not listening to music has helped a bit.
darkteflon 6y ago
I’ve noticed exactly the same thing. I also use QC35s but I assume the brand and model is just a coincidence - that the noise cancelling tech itself is the culprit. I don’t have any evidence one way or another for this but very interested to read that others out there are having a similar experience.
JoachimS 6y ago
(Anecdote time.) I got myself Airpods Pro last autumn and used the transparent mode. After a few weeks my tinnitus had become way worse. After 3-4 months it had died down a bit (but not to what it used to be before the pods.) I then used them again for a couple of days. And it became even worse. Haven't used them for 6 months and unfortunately it is still as bad. I don't dare using them or my Bose headphones anymore. Your comment is the first I've seen relating noise cancelling with tinnitus.
- jagged-chisel 6y ago
  You mentioned using transparent mode. It's not real transparency: there's a mic on the back/top whose input is added to the other signal coming from Bluetooth. I personally find this mode annoying af. Have you attempted noise cancelling mode? Have you attempted turning off the noise control altogether?

mozey 6y ago

I developed constant tinnitus a couple of years ago, probably from a sequence of causes: I've had sinus problems since childhood. Some exposure to loud music. An upper back spine injury that affects my neck and chest muscles. With this I sometimes had tinnitus, usually worse in the evenings or after spending many hours in front of a screen. Then I got knocked on the head twice, the second time left a small dent in my nose, and it damaged the right side of my jaw. After this the tinnitus became more permanent. Almost worse than the tinnitus is that my ears are always popping, as in many times per day. Just sitting at my desk I'll get the same sensation you get on descent when scuba diving, and I have to pinch my nose and blow on it to equalize. Any else have this symptom?

MrGilbert 6y ago
> Any else have this symptom? Yes. I don't have tinnitus or anything related, but I have been diagnosed with TMJD after months of visiting different doctors and therelike. At the end, my dentist had the right idea. There are a lot of factors that come into play. I also think that our bodies are simply not made for this much "sitting time". Anyhow, I have a "popping" noise when I tilt my head back and forth. I simply learned to live with it. After the last sickness, I also developed a "clogged" feeling in my left ear, with my ear doctor telling me that "everything looks fine." I also learned to live with this.

Unklejoe 6y ago

I have had tinnitus since as long as I can remember. About a year ago, it got significantly worse during a period of time which happened to align with extreme stress in my personal life. I also developed muscle fasciculations at the same time, which led to a anxiety spiral of ALS fears (turned out to be benign like most fasciculations). Anyway, I'm luckily one of the people who's able to sort of tune the tinnitus out. I pretty much forget I have it until I see an article about it...

LinuxBender 6y ago

Can the author of the article answer this? I have a tens-7000 with the ear clips. They would probably work fine on the tongue. What would I need to set the Width, Rate and Mode to in order to replicate this therapy?