LIVING WITH TINNITUS: IT CAN BE EASIER THAN IT SOUNDS

One morning in 1990, David M. woke early and remarked to his wife that the cicadas were making a particularly loud racket. He thought they were much noisier than usual.

‘What cicadas?’ she asked. ‘There are none, we’ve never had any.’

At that moment David, a retired electrical engineer, realised the noises were coming from inside his head, from somewhere deep in his left ear. He couldn’t remember how long he had been hearing the cicadas – it could have been weeks or months – but the realisation that he was generating the noises himself was alarming.

His alarm grew when a specialist diagnosed tinnitus, and without a hint of concern, declared the condition incurable. He said David had no option but to learn to live with his noises.

Tinnitus is a common and invisible condition estimated to affect a million Australians. It is the perception of a noise when there is no corresponding external sound present. Most people who have tinnitus experience ringing, although a wide range of sounds has been reported, including buzzing, humming, roaring, hissing and clanging. Tinnitus is not a disease but is a symptom of damage to some part of the auditory system. This damage might be minor, but its consequences for the individual may be major.

While most people adapt to the sounds in time, for a small percentage the condition remains highly debilitating. The unrelenting noise drives them to distraction. They feel trapped, and the noise erodes their ability to sleep and concentrate. Essentially, they feel they have lost the possibility of silence. Men are said to suffer more from this condition than women because of their occupations and lifestyle.

Tinnitus can be caused or aggravated by ear disorders, excessive noise exposure, ageing, some prescribed drugs, head and neck injuries, stress and fatigue, excessive alcohol, smoking, recreational drugs and, infrequently, brain tumours.

Today David, who is in his 70s, has, after some stress, accommodated to his tinnitus. As with many other men, his tinnitus came on top of a small hearing loss. During World War II he took the full blast of a pistol shot next to his left ear and can still remember how it caused him to swing round with pain. During his working life he endured extreme noise from machinery and explosives in quarries.

Two things helped him cope initially. The first was talking to other sufferers about their shared problems. ‘This made me accept that there is no cure and that it was up to me. It was in my hands and there were several things I could do mentally to counteract it.’

The second was a visit to an audiologist who managed to reproduce the sounds that David was hearing. The audiologist then created a tape with sound waves that were equal to, and opposite to, those sounds.

When David listened to the tape, its sounds cancelled out his. This was initially effective but became less so over time.

Unlike external sounds, internal sounds aren’t easy to get used to. After living next to a railway line for a month, people stop noticing the train noise. The same thing doesn’t happen after living with tinnitus for a month. In some cases it can lead to depression. In rare cases, the noises become so unbearably intrusive that they drive people to suicide.

In the 19th century, tinnitus was known as ‘boilermaker’s ear’; today men are still being exposed to unacceptably high levels of noise in industry, in transport and on farms.

Tinnitus is still a ‘Cinderella disability’, and the services available for sufferers are risky, fragmented and uncoordinated. Some resort to hearing aids to reduce or eliminate the noise. There is also a device, called a ‘tinnitus masker’, that looks like a hearing aid but generates a blend of external sounds (white noise) to distract the person from the internal sounds. Tinnitus sufferers say counselling is also valuable.

One of the latest treatments is retraining therapy, a multi-disciplinary approach that aims to retrain the brain so it doesn’t perceive the tinnitus noise.

On a positive note, the longer men have had constant tinnitus, the less intrusive it is likely to be.

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