Ray of hope for tinnitus victims

Good news for people suffering from tinnitus. For long, sufferers had to bear the agony of experiencing a ringing or buzzing in their ears. The latest approach to the treatment of this disability holds some hopes for tinnitus sufferers, who can now look for a quality life free from impediments caused by tinnitus. Tinnitus is known to cause sleeplessness, memory problems, shatter relationships, eventually forcing many victims to take their own lives. The problem with this disability is that its symptoms are silent which gives the victim a sense of loneliness. Although many describe tinnitus as mild ringing, its effects are much more debilitating. And because very few people have any reliable knowledge about the disability, most of them fail to understand the horrible experience tinnitus sufferers have to go through which might destroy their lives. Just imagine having all kinds of squealing, whistling sounds inside you that simply refuse to go away!

Even though most general physicians had decided to throw in the towel against tinnitus, all is not lost yet. Berthold Langutth, a German neurologist, has come to the conclusion that the hearing cells in the auditory cortex in tinnitus victims tend to be overactive and normalization of this condition will help to tackle this disease. In order to reduce unwanted sound a tinnitus victim keeps hearing, Langutth has run an electric current through sections of wire to create a magnetic field. He has then held it over the head of a sufferer and observed that the magnetic stimulation reduces the neural activity and brings relief to the victim. While the method has been successful in reducing the severity of tinnitus in many sufferers, one patient has been found completely cured. Belgian neurosurgeon Dirk De Ridder has implanted electrodes directly into patients’ brains to normalize the overactive neurons. Research workers in Cambridge have found that lidocaine, the highly familiar anesthetic, can reduce the sound in two thirds of tinnitus victims for nearly five minutes. By all indications, tinnitus sufferers will get the silence they are longing for in the not-too-distant future.