Here’s one from my support group that may help others…
Anyone had any experience with "notch therapy"?. My understanding is you/your Audiologist finds the pitch of your tinnitus and then a program plays white noise except that pitch in the hope of distracting the brain from that pitch. Anyone used it/had any success? I've heard claims it can reduce T and others that claim after a few months can make it disappear. But don't know if this is just marketing?
I’ve heard of notch therapy, and yes it’s marketing. Notch therapy is sound therapy, neither will make a difference to how a patient responds* to their T.
Sound can be a useful tool to help you distract your brain, but without underlying understanding, you’re back to square one when you turn it off. That’s why it doesn’t work. Incidentally it’s also why people who get sound therapy from a good audiologist improve their scores - because they’ve had some quality information while they were in there!
That being said, if you have high pitch T, pink noise contains more stimulus in the high pitch region and you might want to choose that over white noise as a more effective “masking” tool.
Other than that, finding your notch and tuning in sound to fit it is performative. It makes an audiologist feel like they’re doing something scientific. They are almost always operating with good intentions, so it’s not a con, per se.
It has not been proven, and there’s plenty of research out there, so if it was going to work it would have been proven by now.
~ Sally - Audiologist
*Your response to your tinnitus dictates how distressed you are by it, how much it’s affecting you. How distressed you are links to how you respond to your T. We measure distress like this by using questionnaires. Your distress score is linked to how often/loud you perceive your T, but it’s not the only factor. So someone like myself might perceive their T daily but be unbothered by it. Someone else may only perceive it 2 hours a week but be undone by it, waiting for it to happen, having it happen, or recovering from an episode - they can be affected all day every day.
تعليقات