From Bothersome To Non-Bothersome

Where is the cure for tinnitus?

Okay.

This is a question that comes up in the mind of probably every single person that has bothersome tinnitus.

And so there's a big push, you know, for researchers and clinicians to find that cure. And it can bring up a lot of anger in the person with bothersome tinnitus to think that they haven't found it yet.

Even feelings of panic or fear, or, "Nobody can help me."

You know, here we have all this technology, and then there's no cure for tinnitus.

Where's the pill? Where's the procedure that's going to make this go away?

And that, in and of itself, can become something that a person with bothersome tinnitus can get locked and loaded on.

And while there's no traditional cure, as in making it go away, there is an effective cure for tinnitus that a person can very easily overlook.

And so what I explain to the people that I'm working with is, yes, at this time—and there might be someday, who knows—at this time, there's no pill, there's no procedure, there's no brain surgery that anybody would want to get to, you know, to make tinnitus go away for the rest of your life.

However, 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?"

Okay?

So I'll ask again:

"If you have a benign body sensation for the rest of your life and it doesn't bother you, can you live with that?"

And invariably, the answer is yes.

And so where I see the effective cure is in shifting tinnitus from bothersome—we've spoken about the 20 million Americans with bothersome tinnitus—shifting tinnitus from the bothersome category into the non-bothersome category.

And this is 100% possible for all humans.

I mean, the brain knows what to do with benign body sensations: pushing it into the background, or not, you know, it not being interesting enough for us to put it in the front of our minds.

But for the person with bothersome tinnitus, they have connected tinnitus with fear.

And tinnitus does not feel benign.

Tinnitus feels like something that the brain has to pay attention to because it's a danger.

But that is the brain's misunderstanding of this benign body sensation.

And so perhaps the work needs to be in using our brain to change our brain and helping our brain reappraise tinnitus for what it actually is.

And this can be a long process for many people.

It can be the hardest thing that they do in their lives.

But there, therein lies the effective cure for tinnitus.

Again, if you have a benign body sensation and it is being that for the rest of your life and it doesn't bother you, can you be okay with that?

And that's a very important question to ask ourselves.

What I find very often is people get so locked and loaded on finding the cure that it brings up anger and frustration, and kind of a monofocus on going from study to study to study, and chat room to chat room to chat room, and pill to pill to pill, and gimmick to gimmick to gimmick, thinking that there has to be a cure for this.

When all of a sudden, they've forgotten to realize that there is an effective cure.

And that effective cure is something that each person can do for themselves.

It is shifting tinnitus from bothersome to non-bothersome.