A New Device Could Silence Tinnitus!

Are you one of the lucky 1-in-5 people who suffer from a persistent ringing, buzzing, clicking, roaring, or hissing sound in your ears? Congrats! You likely have tinnitus!

I am one of the unlucky 20%. I've had some ear issues my entire life; twice I had ear tubes as a child. An aerosol can exploded a foot from my head. I'm a 20+ year musician who didn't use earplugs for the first 10 years. I now use in-ear monitors, which I can't imagine performing without.

My subjective tinnitus is a constant ringing, but fortunately not overwhelming. I can only hear it when the rest of my world is quiet. I even figured out that my tinnitus rings at 7800 Hz.

I keep a white noise generator app on my phone in case it gets too quiet.

For years, the prognosis for long-term tinnitus sufferers wasn't good; there's no curing it, you're stuck with it until you die. How uplifting!

Now, for sufferers of tinnitus like me, there may finally be an answer...and it even involves shocks!

Scientists hook you up to a device that issues "...precisely timed blasts of sound and electrical impulses to 'reset' the responsible nerve activity in the brain."

Shocking!

The device was put on clinical trial involving 21 adult humans. 4 weeks later, most of the subjects said that the severity of their tinnitus had been drastically reduced, with a few even claiming that their tinnitus had been completely eradicated.

Encouraging!

I'm hoping this therapy is cheaper than the recently-declared cure for blindness. If not, then I guess I'll have to either keep living with it...or try zapping myself. That never ends badly!

H/T: IFLS