DMSO Cured My Unilateral Tinnitus?

Ruby Gray

Member
Author
Feb 24, 2025
1
Tinnitus Since
2006
Cause of Tinnitus
ENT infection. Temp deafness on 6 takeoffs & landings.
I have suffered from constant tinnitus for nearly 20 years. It started after I caught a painful strep throat infection while flying from Australia to the United States. The infection went untreated.

On the return trip, I endured six takeoffs and landings, which left me completely deaf. I could see people's mouths moving but heard nothing. No jet engine noise, nothing at all.

Back home, I experienced vertigo and a strange hollow sound when I tapped my skull. Then, tinnitus developed. Where I once enjoyed listening to frogs singing outside at night, now those frogs were all inside my head.

I never heard of a reliable cure for tinnitus, nor did fellow sufferers.

Recently, I developed polymyalgia rheumatica, which caused excruciating pain from bursitis and synovitis in all my hip and shoulder joints. The pain was crippling and incapacitating. On good days, it would ease enough by late afternoon for me to get a few small chores done.

I heard about DMSO as a pain reliever and decided to try it. I applied 100 percent pure DMSO topically, covering the skin around my right shoulder, which was by far the most painful area. I spread it from the right side of my neck, over and around my shoulder, and down my arm to the elbow. I repeated this for three consecutive days.

The pain in my right shoulder lessened, but then it returned with a vengeance. The discomfort, combined with the strong garlic odor from DMSO breakdown products exuding from my skin, discouraged me from continuing its use.

Later, I came across a reference suggesting that DMSO might help with tinnitus, though it provided no details on how it was used. A few days after my initial DMSO applications, I tried to assess the tinnitus in both ears. This was difficult, as the shrill sound is hard to localize.

However, I soon realized something surprising. While the high pitched whine in my left ear remained unchanged, the noise in my right ear was gone.

Cupping my ears with my hands made the ringing in my left ear more pronounced, but I could not hear it on the right side. Plugging each ear in turn produced the same result.

It has now been about three weeks since I used DMSO. I am working up the courage to treat my left side, though I am wary of the garlic odor issue. My plan is to apply DMSO to a wide area of skin on the left side of my neck and shoulder, hoping for a similar outcome.

It seems too good to be true, but so far the results suggest this might work and I could finally be free of tinnitus.

I did note that some medical trials combined DMSO with other drugs, including steroids, and applied the mixture inside the ear canal. However, I used pure DMSO alone, applied over a wide area of skin below my right ear.
 
Cautiously optimistic: after two "chemotherapy" applications with Dimethyl sulfoxide (local topical: head, neck, ears, mastoid process, face) and sodium thiosulfate parahydrate (topical and ingested), my tinnitus is still there, still loud, but my hearing seems to be less "delicate". My worst complaint has been the "tenderness" of my hearing, how my ears always figuratively felt raw, bloody and injured all the time. Tinnitus alone (without the hyperacusis aspect) would almost be a breeze by comparison. Hyperacusis is Hell. The change was subtle. My tinnitus is still there, loud as ever. But it seems to be less reactive to auditory input. If this observation is correct, it could be huge. I am cautiously listening to music (!) (Durutti Column, Can and Holger Czukay, if you were wondering) on my real system (still at very low volume -- it's early days yet) (and I have a conditioned response of fear of anything louder than a whisper that I may have to unlearn) for the first time in years. Hyperacusis was what made me fearful about the future and have suicidal ideas. Tinnitus I can live with. I hope I am right.
 
Cautiously optimistic: after two "chemotherapy" applications with Dimethyl sulfoxide (local topical: head, neck, ears, mastoid process, face) and sodium thiosulfate parahydrate (topical and ingested), my tinnitus is still there, still loud, but my hearing seems to be less "delicate". My worst complaint has been the "tenderness" of my hearing, how my ears always figuratively felt raw, bloody and injured all the time. Tinnitus alone (without the hyperacusis aspect) would almost be a breeze by comparison. Hyperacusis is Hell. The change was subtle. My tinnitus is still there, loud as ever. But it seems to be less reactive to auditory input. If this observation is correct, it could be huge. I am cautiously listening to music (!) (Durutti Column, Can and Holger Czukay, if you were wondering) on my real system (still at very low volume -- it's early days yet) (and I have a conditioned response of fear of anything louder than a whisper that I may have to unlearn) for the first time in years. Hyperacusis was what made me fearful about the future and have suicidal ideas. Tinnitus I can live with. I hope I am right.

Great to Hear Trespath. If i understand correctly you've treated your first shoulder three times with topical application of DMSO and have treated the second shoulder twice now.

Would love to know what dosage you've used as I'm planing to try this and share my results.

Good luck
 

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