Most estimates put the amount of people affected by tinnitus in the millions or around one out of every seven people. That’s… a lot of people, both in absolute terms and relative to the overall population, and in some countries, the percentage of the population who experience tinnitus is even more alarming.
True, tinnitus isn’t always recurring. But if you’re dealing with persistent tinnitus symptoms it becomes imperative to find a remedy as soon as possible. One of the most beneficial of such remedies is already quite common: hearing aids.
Tinnitus and hearing loss are connected but distinct conditions. It’s possible to experience tinnitus with normal hearing or to have hearing loss without also developing tinnitus. But the two conditions coexist often enough that hearing aids have become a practical solution, treating hearing loss and ending tinnitus in one fell swoop.
How Hearing Aids Can Help Tinnitus
Hearing aids have, according to one study, been reported to give relief of tinnitus symptoms for up to 60% of participants. For 22% of those people, the relief was considerable. In spite of this, hearing aids are actually designed to manage hearing loss not specifically tinnitus. Association appears to be the principal reason for this benefit. So if you have tinnitus along with hearing loss then that’s when your hearing aids will most successfully treat the tinnitus symptoms.
Here’s how hearing aids can help reduce tinnitus symptoms:
- Everything gets slightly louder: When you have loss of hearing, the volume of the world (or, at least, specific wavelengths of the world) can fall away and become more silent. The ringing in your ears, in that situation, is a lot more noticeable. Hearing loss is not affecting the ringing so it becomes the loudest thing you hear. A hearing aid can enhance that ambient sound, helping to mask the ringing or buzzing that was so forefront before. Tinnitus becomes less of an issue as you pay less attention to it.
- It gets easier to have conversations: Modern hearing aids are particularly good at identifying human speech and raising the volume of those sounds. This means carrying on a conversation can be much easier once you’re regularly wearing your devices. You can keep up with the story Carl is telling at happy hour or listen to what Sally is excited about at work. When you have a healthy interactive social life tinnitus can appear to fade into the background. In some cases, tinnitus is worsened by stress so being able to socialize can helps in this way also.
- Your brain is getting an auditory workout: Hearing loss has been shown to put a strain on cognitive function. Tinnitus symptoms you may be experiencing can be reduced when the brain is in a healthy pliable condition and hearing aids can help maintain this.
Modern Hearing Aids Come With Numerous Benefits
Modern hearing aids are smart. To some extent, that’s because they feature the newest technologies and hearing assistance algorithms. But the efficiency of modern hearing aids is achieved in part because each device can be refined and calibrated on a patient-per-patient basis (they can even detect the level of background noise and automatically adjust accordingly).
Personalizing hearing aids means that the sensitivity and output signals can easily be calibrated to the specific hearing levels you might have. The better your hearings aid works for you, the more likely they are to help you mask the humming or buzzing from tinnitus.
What is The Best Way to End Tinnitus?
Your degree of hearing impairment will determine what’s best for you. There are still treatment solutions for your tinnitus even if you don’t have any hearing loss. That could mean custom-made masking devices, cognitive-behavioral therapy, or medication.
But, if you’re one of the many individuals out there who happen to have both hearing loss and tinnitus, a pair of hearing aids could be able to do the old two-birds-one-stone thing. Stop tinnitus from making your life miserable by treating your hearing loss with a good pair of hearing aids.