Viral infection is a common cause. It could take weeks to get better. I had vertigo, tinnitus and temporary hearing loss. Sucked.
For me getting a good night’s sleep is key to preventing an occurrence of tinnitus. Its like my own body warning me to take it easy.
It never goes away in my left ear, unfortunately, due to Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss. Usually the tinnitus is at a low enough level I can tune it out, but it really sucks that I am now completely unable to enjoy silence.
It definitely flares up and down, although the sudden 24-hour flare up a couple of weeks ago was a) unprecedented in how sudden and dramatic it was; b) curiously coincidental in its proximity to COVID.
As you say, a good night’s sleep seems to be connected - and/or stress. Sort of hard to tell, since stress usually comes along with horrible sleep.
For me, I haven’t noticed any correlation with (mild) coffee or alcohol consumption. For a few weeks back when all this started, I did avoid coffee and alcohol, and cook out of low-salt cookbooks. It made no appreciable difference in the tinnitus, but maybe that’s because increased stress from hating mornings and all food balanced out whatever positive effects my drinking & eating habits had earned.
Friggin’ hell. Vegetable soups made with no stock. Wow that food was dire.
I’d rather stick sharpened chopsticks in my eyes and up my ass.
Huh. Your acupuncture treatment sounds significantly more painful than mine was.
Acupuncture didn’t help for me. My wife insisted that I gave up too soon and I would need to continue once or twice a week for, oh, the rest of my life.
Of course it didn’t. It’s quackery. May as well rub your ears with potatoes during a full moon.
Just look at it as a metronome that’s always with you.
Placebo effects are real, and heck, if my brain were able to trick itself into healing from random needles stuck in my face and arm, I’d take it.
But it’s not a metronome. It’s a monotone oven-timer whine, or a speaker with faulty wiring and no sound, turned up too loud, or the sound TV static used to make.
In order for a placebo to work, you’d have to fool yourself into believing it will work. Otherwise it’s just snake oil.
Yeah, but if you focus on the sound and give yourself to it, it can be a meditative tool. Become one with it.
this is contrary to the voices on this forum that TW TW soldiers hardly fire their guns 
the recent divorce thread said that gray hair and stress is the result of being married to a foreign man. Perhaps tinnitus is rhe result of being married to a local woman…
I think that’s pretty much it, trial and error, yet not much known yet. I mean, we know some of the causes, but we aren’t sure about all cases, actually in many cases docs can’t just pinpoint the cause.
But you know some of the factors, so make an effort to lessen those.
Neither for me. Maybe we received the same treatment from the same practitioner, actually. But still I don’t think it’s his fault per se, I think acupuncture in general is bollocks.
Yup. But it wasn’t expensive and it was very low-risk and my wife really wanted me to try it, so what the heck. Did it ease tinnitus stress, no, did it ease marital stress, absolutely.
This source sums it up fairly well I think - but since we live in Taiwan, acupuncture doesn’t cost much. It was a cheap long shot.
Although Chinese medicine practitioners have been using acupuncture to treat hearing loss and deafness for centuries, most medical professionals caution that further study is required.
So, as with most alternative therapies, the answer is “it might help.” The risks to your health are low (in rare cases, the needles can lead to an infection). Just keep in mind that acupuncture can be expensive and is rarely covered by health insurance.
Do you also have ear pressure, hearing loss, or any dizziness? If so, can look into menieres as a possibility.
Agree with others on sodium reduction.
My husband had Sudden Sensoineural Hearing Loss while we were living in China! Went almost completely deaf in his right ear, spent 10 days in a hospital getting both Western and TCM treatments. There was some injection with a massively long needle into the hollow space behind his ear- injection of snake venom and colloidal silver. That seemed to really speed along his recovery.
As his hearing was returning though, the tinnitus grew nearly unbearable at times. After recovering about 60% of his hearing, he was discharged to do daily outpatient hyperbaric chamber therapy.
He was told to continue taking Gingko Biloba tablets.
After 6 months he went for a follow-up appt and the doctor was shocked to find that his hearing was back up to 80%.
The tinnitus flare-ups happen when he’s tired, overstrains during exercise, stressed out, dehydrated (too much coffee or alcohol or both).
It’s been three years now, and he still keeps Ginkgo tablets on hand because he finds that it really does help ease his tinnitus. Can get it OTC in most pharmacies.
Saturday night I woke up in the middle of the night with the strongest tinnitus I think I ever had, a super strong noise, industrial like, or maybe that was the perception of it since it was quiet except for the tinnitus.
Terrible!
Funny thing is that I have some hearing loss in the other ear, which is the “bad” one, but this one has done funny things a few times.
Huh. I assume it means nothing, but it’s an odd coincidence that basically the same thing happened to me last night. Slept terribly, waking up from the noise every hour or so.
A discouraging number of my students have been going on about how Mercury is in retrograde, so maybe that’s the cause for both of us.
I don’t remember in detail but I don’t think I was sleeping bad… I remember waking up in the middle of the night and having a super loud tinnitus. I had a beer that night before going to sleep, i wonder if there’s any connection (previous weekend I got a bit tipsy thanks to some serious poison from simple mart and I also had more tinnitus than normal).
I don’t think it’s planets related… But who knows!
I don’t think I know anybody IRL who knows shit about astronomy. What do they study? Astrophysics?
