What is TINNITUS, anyway? Dr. Jennifer Gans explains in simple terms

The Effective Cure
Tinnitus is a benign body sensation that the brain thinks is important to pay attention to when, in fact, it can allow it to go comfortably into the background.

So I'll say that probably 15 times today. But tinnitus is a benign body sensation that the brain thinks is important to pay attention to when, in fact, it isn't.

Okay.

So, uh, you know, if I could get into the numbers, we have 50 million Americans. That's a huge number. Fifty million Americans experience tinnitus.

But that huge number doesn't give us really the information we need.

So, of that 50 million, if we break it into parts, of that 50 million, 20 million are bothered enough by their tinnitus to go to their doctor and say, "Oh God, this is not okay. Something is really wrong."

Okay? So I call that the 20 million. I call that the bothersome group.

And I keep things very simple. So, if we all do the math together, that leaves 30 million Americans that are walking the streets of our country with tinnitus and they don't care.

So, my work is not to get rid of tinnitus because, first of all, I don't know that I have—well, I definitely don't think I have control of that.

And if, you know, I don't think people with bothersome tinnitus necessarily have control of that, or they wouldn't come see me, right? Or they wouldn't be pursuing help.

So, I'm going to leave that to the powers that be.

It's not to say that tinnitus won't go away, but it's just my way of saying I don't necessarily have control of that.

But what I 100% know to be a fact is that you can shift tinnitus from the 20 million bothersome group into the 30 million non-bothersome group.

And then I ask my patients, "If you have a benign body sensation for the rest of your life and it doesn't bother you, can you be okay with that?"

And invariably they say, "Of course."

I mean, we've got a lot of benign body sensations going on in our body that, you know, we might notice one day, and then we're, you know, it's the furthest thing from our mind.

And so that—I like to pursue the 100%.

I find that my job is so much more rewarding, and people get very, very definite relief if we focus on the goal of shifting tinnitus from the bothersome group into the non-bothersome group.

And so that is really, I think, what everybody—anybody that's bothered by tinnitus—should be aspiring to. I call that the effective cure.

You know, people get all up in arms. "Where's the cure? What's wrong with these researchers? What's happening with these doctors? Where's the pill? Where's the procedure?"

Well, you know, you can't fix something that's not broken, first of all.

Okay?

And so, but what we do have is the effective cure.

If tinnitus doesn't bother you, then so what?

A benign body sensation that doesn't bother you is, you know, just another sensation.