What is Tinnitus Retraining Therapy?

Tinnitus retraining therapy (TRT) centers around tinnitus counseling, which aims to teach you about your condition and how retraining techniques and sound enrichment can alter the way you react to and perceive the sound of your tinnitus.

What Are the Components of Tinnitus Retraining Therapy?

There are three major components to tinnitus retraining therapy: an evaluation of the your daily habits and history, the fitting and use of broad-band noise generating devices that can help cancel out or muffle tinnitus auditory frequencies and therapeutic training to help you learn how to manage and ignore tinnitus symptoms

Why Are Counseling Sessions Required?

Counseling sessions will teach you what tinnitus is and how your perception of it affects the way you react to the sounds. As you progress, you’ll learn more about methods for changing how you perceive tinnitus. As your reactions to tinnitus are altered through counseling and education, you’ll become less and less aware of your symptoms.

What Is Behavioral Therapy?

Behavioral therapy is used to help tinnitus patients manage their emotional reaction to their symptoms. Because the side effects of tinnitus can include insomnia, depression, anxiety, and other issues that affect mental health and wellbeing, helping you learn emotional coping techniques and develop a range of strategies you can deploy has been shown to reduce these same side effects.

What Are Retraining Exercises?

Retraining exercises are designed to reduce your reaction to your tinnitus, decrease your awareness of the sound and eventually eliminate any feelings of annoyance associated with tinnitus.

What Is Sound Enrichment?

Sound enrichment can help you naturally quiet or completely filter out the sounds caused by your tinnitus. Tinnitus therapy works best when the sounds used for retraining are just a little quieter than the tinnitus symptoms.

Tinnitus Treatments | Advanced Hearing

There is no universal cure for tinnitus, but there are treatments that make it less of a distraction. Because tinnitus is a side effect of an underlying condition, identifying the problem may lead to a medical or surgical solution. The cure rates for pulsatile tinnitus are quite high once the problem has been identified.

Unfortunately, in many cases the exact cause of tinnitus can’t be identified, or treatment is not possible. However, symptoms can often be managed successfully through a number of different strategies.

Acoustic Therapy

Sounds are used to cover up, or mask, the tinnitus. This distracts your brain and helps you “tune out” the ringing in your ears. Electronic devices that produce white noise, air conditioners, fans, soft music, etc. can all be employed.

Tinnitus Retraining Therapy

Similar in concept to acoustic therapy, tinnitus retraining therapy utilizes a portable sound generator that produces soft patterned tones to help desensitize the brain to the sounds of tinnitus.

Steroid Injections

Meniere’s disease (also known as endolympatic hydrops) has a triad of symptoms (hearing loss, tinnitus, vertigo) that fluctuate due to increased fluid pressures in the ear organs. Fluctuation of hearing and resulting tinnitus can be treated with a series of injections of Dexamethasone (a potent steroid) with an 85 percent chance of reduction in tinnitus symptoms.

Surgery

If you have an acoustic neuroma and suffer from tinnitus, the tinnitus may be resolved through a surgical removal of the acoustic neuroma. In a 1981 research study of more than 400 patients, 45 percent improved their tinnitus with the surgical removal of the acoustic neuroma.

Hearing aids

Hearing loss causes maladaptive neuroplastic changes in the brain. Hearing aids are used to stimulate the auditory pathways received by the brain. Background sounds can mask tinnitus. Hearing aids can also help the patient better distinguish one sound from another, improving communication and helping with focus and concentration difficulties. Many devices also come packaged with noise generators to replace ambient sounds if amplification alone does not reduce tinnitus.

Counseling

Counseling, sleep and cognitive behavioral or relaxation methods can be practical in helping you manage your tinnitus symptoms by reducing the stress, anxiety and sleeplessness that are often associated with tinnitus. Advanced Hearing providers teach methods to help you manage your tinnitus symptoms.