Shop 7/104 Northbourne Ave
Braddon ACT 2612
Braddon ACT 2612
Weekdays 9 to 5, Saturday 10 to 2.
Assessment and management
Nobody else can hear it. That does not make it imaginary.
Tinnitus management at Candid Hearing starts with a full hearing assessment, because in most people the ringing and an underlying hearing loss are the same story. From there, Pooja characterises the sound, works out how much it is costing you in sleep and concentration, and builds a plan around reducing the intrusion rather than promising a cure.
1 in 6
Australian adults experience tinnitus at some point
Most
Cases sit alongside some degree of hearing loss
No cure
We will not claim one. We will work on the intrusion
Step one
A full hearing assessment, every time
Tinnitus is hearing a sound that has no external source. Usually ringing, sometimes hissing, buzzing, whistling or a high-pitched tone. It is a symptom rather than a disease, and the most common thing underneath it is damage to the hair cells of the inner ear, from age or from noise exposure.
The most useful way to think about it is that the sound is generated centrally, not in the ear. When the ear stops sending signal at certain frequencies, the auditory parts of the brain turn up their own gain to compensate, rather like a microphone amplifier being wound up in a silent room until it hisses. The hiss is real, it is just not coming from outside.
That explains two things people find baffling: why it is often worse in silence, and why restoring the missing sound with hearing aids frequently helps.
Loudness turns out to be a poor predictor of distress. Two people can match their tinnitus to almost identical pitch and volume, and one barely thinks about it while the other cannot sleep.
The difference is how the brain has classified the sound. Your auditory system filters out an enormous amount all day. You are not hearing your own clothes moving right now. Once tinnitus gets flagged as a threat, it is exempted from that filtering and promoted to your attention every time it occurs, which reinforces the threat classification. That loop is what makes tinnitus unbearable, and that loop is what treatment targets.
The goal is not silence. The goal is getting the sound reclassified as background, the way you have already stopped hearing the refrigerator.
Where there is a loss, amplification is the single most effective intervention available, and it is routinely skipped because people arrive asking about tinnitus and not about hearing. Restoring real sound at the frequencies the brain is missing reduces the internal gain and gives your attention somewhere else to go.
Never total silence, particularly at night. A fan, low broadband noise, rain, a radio at the edge of audibility. The aim is not to drown the tinnitus out, which tends to backfire, but to reduce the contrast between it and the room.
Structured approaches combining counselling with sound therapy work by changing the classification rather than the signal. This takes months, not weeks, and it is the part that produces the people who tell you they have not thought about their tinnitus in days.
Poor sleep makes tinnitus worse and tinnitus makes sleep worse. Attacking that directly, including a referral for cognitive behavioural therapy where it is warranted, has good evidence behind it.
Tinnitus attracts more unproven products than almost any other health complaint. Supplements, detox regimes, apps promising to eliminate it in days. If something claims to cure tinnitus, be sceptical. You will not be sold one here, and if the honest answer to a question is that the evidence is weak, you will be told that.
See a doctor promptly if your tinnitus is in one ear only, pulses in time with your heartbeat, began suddenly, or came with sudden hearing loss or dizziness. Sudden hearing loss is treated as a medical urgency.
Common questions
For most people, no, and you should be sceptical of anyone who tells you otherwise. What there is, and it is not a consolation prize, is a set of approaches that reliably reduce how loud it seems and how much of your attention it takes. Plenty of people who once found it unbearable now go days without noticing it.
No. It means the target is the distress and the intrusiveness rather than the sound itself. Treating any underlying hearing loss, retraining how your brain files the sound, sound enrichment and sleep strategies all have evidence behind them. The combination that works is different for each person, which is why it starts with an assessment.
Often, yes, and it is the most underrated option. Most tinnitus sits alongside some hearing loss. When the missing frequencies are amplified again, the brain has real sound to attend to and the internal noise becomes relatively quieter and less interesting. Many aids also have built-in sound generators.
See a doctor promptly if the tinnitus is in one ear only, if it pulses in time with your heartbeat, if it came on suddenly, or if it arrives with sudden hearing loss, dizziness or facial weakness. Sudden hearing loss in particular is treated as urgent. Ordinary tinnitus in both ears that has been there for years is not an emergency, but it is still worth assessing.
Because it is not competing with anything. Tinnitus does not get louder in a quiet room; everything else gets quieter. That is also why sound enrichment at night, something neutral and low level, helps so many people get to sleep.
For most people, clearly yes, and it runs both directions, which is the trap. Stress makes the tinnitus more noticeable, the tinnitus adds stress. Breaking that loop is a large part of what tinnitus management is actually doing.
A full hearing assessment first, because you cannot manage tinnitus without knowing what the hearing is doing. Then pitch and loudness matching to characterise your tinnitus, a discussion about how much it is affecting sleep, concentration and mood, and a plan built from there.
An assessment tells you what is driving the noise and what can realistically be done about it. That is a very different conversation from being told there is nothing to be done.
