Tinnitus Assessment and Management

Let's discuss about tinnitus, how it is assessed - subjective and objective clinical evaluation, treatment and management.

Tinnitus - What is it?

Tinnitus is the term for the sensation of hearing a sound in the absence of any external sound. Symptoms of tinnitus include hearing different types of sounds, for example, ringing, whooshing or humming or buzzing in the ear. These can be continuous, intermittent (repeats after regular or irregular intervals of time) or spontaneous (might last a few moments to a few minutes). The tinnitus might seem like it’s in one ear or both, in the middle of the head or even be difficult to pinpoint.

If you would like to get more information about tinnitus or need help with your tinnitus problem, please visit our clinic for our tinnitus information brochure.

Assessment of Tinnitus

There are two approaches to assess tinnitus assessment - subjective and objective. The subjective approach involves administering a questionnaire to patients to gather information about their perception, extent of severity, level of handicap (how much it bothers the person) and other experiences. Subjective assessment involves a more detailed characterization in terms of the type and frequency of tinnitus, and is usually performed with the help of a high-frequency testing equipment. The goal of assessment using both approaches is to identify and prescribe the most suitable management techniques to alleviate the effects of tinnitus.

Tinnitus Treatment

As of today, there is no known permanent cure or treatment for tinnitus. This is due to the fact that in most cases, tinnitus is not a problem of the ear itself but a reaction in the brain to auditory system damage caused by several factors (American Tinnitus Association). If tinnitus exists along with hearing loss, it is possible to alleviate tinnitus problems with the use of hearing aids.

Tinnitus Management

Tinnitus is a highly perceptible condition that has the potential to negatively affect a person's quality of life. There are several tools and techniques that have been proven effective in reducing the impact of tinnitus in everyday life. It is important to get an assessment from your physician or a hearing healthcare provider and find out which management options will work best for you. Your physician or audiologist may also be able to help you identify potential reasons that may be causing or increasing symptoms of tinnitus and suggest ways to control them.

Sound Therapy for Managing Tinnitus

Most people who experience tinnitus are also generally aware of the fact that presence of background noise tends to suppress tinnitus. Sound therapy uses this concept to play sounds from nature or everyday objects to shift the brain's focus from tinnitus to processing the incoming auditory stimulus.

Audio files for sound therapy

You can find below a set of natural audio sounds that you can find helpful for tinntus sound therapy. Click an audio file from the list below to select a single track, or hold down the Ctrl key to select multiple tracks at once. To play a track, click the track name from the list and click Play. Each track is approximately one hour long and the file size is around 60MB. The player can only play one track at a time.

Download Audio Files

You can also download tracks to your computer by clicking the Download button on the audio player. If you wish to download multiple files, you can select one or more files and then click the download button to download only the selected files. Please note that the tracks will be downloaded as a ZIP file, so you will have to extract the audio files to be able to play them in a music player of your choice.

WARNING! We highly recommend that you download individual tracks only. When you click the Download button, it will download all audio data to your device right away. The file size of each audio file is 60MB, so please consider downloading only the specific files you need to optimize both bandwidth during downloading and disk space for the downloaded content.

If you wish to download all the nature sound audio files, please click on the link to download them as a single zip file (total download size is around 3GB).