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Have you ever gone to a really good concert, festival, or an event that featured loud music, firework shows, or anything else that could be considered noisy? Do you remember the feeling after your ears ringing? If so, we understand that this can be extremely annoying. There’s nothing worse than ringing an ear, but if you were diagnosed with suffering from Tinnitus, then this feeling and sound will never go away.

Tinnitus is an underlying symptom of many larger medical issues. From being exposed to loud music, or even loud workplaces, like in a factory for example, or even from whiplash and other injuries, Tinnitus is something that can’t be cured, but with the power of  transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS experiment, the constant ringing, humming, or even buzzing has been found to cure many people. From a non-curable symptom that affects up to 15-20 percent of people like Tinnitus, TMS can help to erase it. 

Continue reading this article to learn:

• What is Tinnitus?
• What are the Two Types of Tinnitus?
• What is TMS?
• A TMS Experiment that Changed the Lives of Tinnitus Sufferers
• The Future for TMS on Tinnitus

What is Tinnitus?

There is a lot of confusion as to what Tinnitus is. The truth is that it is not a condition all in itself. It is actually an underlying symptom that can be caused as a result of certain conditions like age-related hearing loss, injury to the ears, or it can even come from a circulatory system disorder. Although Tinnitus doesn’t cause any physical pain for someone, it can be extremely annoying when trying to perform daily activities and dealing with a constant buzzing in their ears. 

What is the Cause of Tinnitus?

It can sometimes be difficult to identify where someone’s Tinnitus actually comes from. Since it’s really only considered a symptom to many other different conditions that one can have, doctors can find it troubling to point out the exact source of someone experiencing Tinnitus. Doctors have found that many common causes of Tinnitus, such as age-related hearing loss, extended exposure to loud noises, blockage from ear wax, or even if someone’s ear bone structure changes, which tends to be an issue only if this runs in someone’s family.

Tinnitus can also be a result of other larger, more serious health conditions. This can include many different diseases, disorders, injuries, dysfunctions, and in more serious conditions, it can be as a result of a blood vessel disorder. Some of these conditions that cause Tinnitus to occur can be from head or neck injuries, muscle spasms in the inner ear, Meniere’s disease, head and neck tremors, high blood pressure, and in some serious cases, atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis is a buildup of cholesterol that can affect the inside of someone’s ear to lose any or all elasticity, which helps the ear to flex with your heartbeat. With atherosclerosis, you can feel the heartbeat in your ear more clearly than ever before.

There are also certain kinds of medications that can cause Tinnitus, some even as common as antibiotics. The certain antibiotics that it can come from are polymyxin b, neomycin, erythromycin, and a few others. Tinnitus can also come from different cancer medications that a cancer patient may be taking, water pills, quinine medications that are used on malaria, and even antidepressants and aspirin users. If tinnitus is caused by medications, it can usually stop or even get better once someone stops using medications. 

Are There Any Symptoms to Tinnitus? 

The symptoms of Tinnitus are considered to be “phantom noises.” Why is this the case? This is because Tinnitus is something that affects the inside of someone’s ears and it’s a noise that only they can hear. With some common symptoms such as buzzing, humming, clicking, and even ringing, Tinnitus can affect not only one ear, but both, making the constant ringing in someone’s ears louder, and even more bothersome. 

Now from an outsider’s perspective, how bad could this be? Well, it can actually be very draining on a person that suffers from this condition. Someone that suffers from Tinnitus can actually cause people to lose their concentration to focus on how to drown out the noise that goes on in their own ears. It can be extremely annoying and cause a great deal of stress with not being able to focus on things that someone may need to do, like clean, work, go to school, or even from just doing day to day activities. 

What are the Two Types of Tinnitus?

There are two different kinds of tinnitus that someone could be struggling with. These two types are subjective, which is very common, and objective, which is the rarest form of tinnitus. Tinnitus is very common and occurs in about 15% of people and even though it is a symptom that someone is perfectly capable of living with, it can be extremely bothersome, even in its most minor form

Subjective Tinnitus

Subjective tinnitus is the most common form of tinnitus and this form consists of only the person suffering to be able to hear the buzzing, ringing, or humming in their ears. Someone can feel the sensation of buzzing either inside of one ear, or both, and also experience it just outside of their head as well. It could consist of one sound, or multiple and there is no treatment for this type of tinnitus. 

Objective Tinnitus

Objective Tinnitus is a much more rarer form of tinnitus where the person that suffers from it not only hears the sounds in their ear, but it can also be detected by someone else as well. Although this doesn’t sound true, when the other person detects it, it almost sounds like a pulsing noise. This pulsing noise can be heard in the other person’s ear tissue as well, or even in the rhythm of their own blood. Only a small majority of people suffer from objective tinnitus, but it does have several treatment options, with getting hearing aids being the most successful.  

What is TMS?

TMS can work wonders on many people that suffer from many brain related issues, the most common being depression, anxiety, PTSD, and even OCD. Transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS for short, is a non-invasive, FDA-approved procedure that involves using magnetic pulses to stimulate certain parts of the brain which helps to maintain and form new neural connections. Although the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has only approved TMS for depression, it drastically helps to alleviate and improve people’s moods to help them overcome whatever brain related issue they are facing.

TMS is known to have a fifty perfect long-term remission rate, which helps people to stay happy and healthy, overcoming depression, anxiety, and so much more. This procedure ultimately helps people to achieve improvements that medications, therapy, or other sources of treatment has failed to do for many years. TMS is a life saving recovery procedure that strives to help give people brand new lives to be able to live without any restrictions that a brain related condition can give them.

Are There Any Harmful Side Effects from TMS?

Fortunately, there aren’t any major side effects from TMS. Side effects generally range from mild to major, the major side effects only affecting the people in the most rare of occasions. Mild side effects can include headaches, lightheadedness, discomfort at the site of the stimulation during the procedure, or even tingling or spasms in the face muscles. 

While the minor side effects aren’t as bad as they sound, there also comes some major side effects that luckily aren’t very common. These uncommon side effects can consist of seizures, hearing loss which comes from not using proper ear protection during the procedure, and mania, which only occurs in patients that suffer from bipolar disorder.

To know if a TMS procedure is right for you, there are some steps that you can take to make sure that you are healthy and eligible enough to undergo it. With simple things such as taking a physical examination and even getting a psychiatric evaluation will help you to understand if you are able to undergo a TMS treatment. TMS is a lifesaving procedure that has helped millions of people, so taking the steps to make sure that you are eligible enough to get one is in your best interest to make sure safe to experience revolutionary results.

A TMS Experiment that Changed the Lives of Tinnitus Sufferers

So with no proven, or effective treatment, how can one live their life with nagging symptoms such as tinnitus? Well, thanks to TMS, there has been a move towards eliminating tinnitus and helping people to live normal lives without that constant ringing in their heads. 

Known as one of the biggest clinical trials in the world funded by the Veterans Affairs Rehabilitation Research and Development Service, researchers found that TMS helped over half of their patients with eliminating their tinnitus. Since veterans are more likely to suffer from tinnitus, the group of participants were half veterans and half non-veterans.

There were 64 patients and half of them actually went through the TMS procedure, and the other half had a placebo TMS treatment. Each participant group, not knowing whether they were part of the active TMS treatment, or the placebo, they each underwent TMS sessions where they each had 2,000 electromagnetic pulses sent to their brain for ten consecutive days. Out of the 32 that had the active TMS treatment, eighteen of them found that the ringing went away for about six months. 

For many people in the group, they experienced tinnitus for more than twenty years and found TMS treatments to significantly help eliminate the ringing in their ears. With the amount of success that the Veteran Affairs had with their TMS experiment on veterans and non-veterans, there is hope that there will be more experiments on TMS and how it helps significantly improve TMS within veterans and non-veterans alike.

The Future for TMS on Tinnitus

Since the Veteran Affairs clinical trial of using TMS to help veterans and non-veterans that suffered from TMS, it has shown how successful the procedure really is. Although TMS has not been approved by the FDA to perform TMS on patients suffering from tinnitus, there is hope for a continuation of experiments to help people with this common symptom due to an underlying condition they may have.

As of right now, the FDA has only approved TMS on patients living with depression, but there is hope in the future to further understand TMS and how it properly works to help improve the lives of many people. From people suffering from PTSD, OCD, and even tinnitus, TMS could be the essential procedure that they need to help cure them from constant ringing in their ears that can become very naggy and even cause them to lose focus on day to day activities. 

TMS has proven time and time again to help and improve the lives of many people, so let’s hope that tinnitus patients will have the opportunity soon to live a normal, happy life without a repetitive ringing, or buzzing in their ears.