Question:

ince an incident with some loud noise, while I had a rather severe head cold last week, I've had a pretty bad case of tinnitus (sounds like stuff ringing, 5KHz and up, in one ear, fairly loud), a bit of hyperacuis (everything in what sounds to be a narrow 1/3 octave band centered at about 1800Hz seems to be louder relative to everything else), and what seems to be a big-time attenuation of most any incoming sounds over 8KHz, all in the same ear.

IN detail, what happened to me: I was at an auto race, and THOUGHT that I was already over the cold, the previous day. However, during the early afternoon hours, I suddenly had a realization that the sounds of these (mostly unmuffled) cars was getting to be UNBEARABLY loud in my right ear, only. This was followed by the eustacion (sp?) tube totally stopping up, and me then spending most of the afternoon with my finger stuck in my ear, to block the sound (like a total idiot, I didn't have any earplugs with me at the time)... unfortunately, I couldn't leave, as I was with a number of other people, and had to wait to share a ride back to where we parked our cars and such... and, bonehead like I was, I just plain wanted to see more cars, too...

I've had a minor case of this before, in the other ear, due to allergies and such, back 5 years ago... but that, IIRC, went mostly away, permanently, in a week or so. However, now in this case, a week later, and the ringing has still not subsided, as I described above. So, in short, has anyone here had treatment for something like this, exactly what did they do, did it work, and how much did it cost? I've heard of some interesting things such as sonic therapy (where they "exercise" the inner ear and eardrum with alternating low- and high-frequency tones, to "re-tension" and "re-tone" the muscles), and such, and just wondered if any of the methods were good, and if any of the stuff was bunk, or even worse, destructive...

Answer:

I've already gone and got the Tinnitus FAQ from www.cccd.edu... good stuff, but I'd also like to hear from REAL PEOPLE around here, if any of y'all might have had something like this kind of treatment done...

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