i do not have hearing loss so the cause of my T is the overreaction of my cortex neurons
He sound s as much of a fool as the first ENT I saw. My honest advice is to find another ENT. I assume he means the auditory cortex. In a way, he is correct, but honestly, I think he has stumbled across a thread of truth, rather than really understanding what he has told you. Put simply, all tinnitus is in the brain, not in the ears. The ear is just a transducer to turn variations in air pressure into electrical impulses - nothing more, nothing less - the clever bit is all in the brain. There are plenty of people without "apparent" hearing loss who suffer with tinnitus (often referred to as hidden hearing loss) and equally plenty of people with severe hearing loss and no tinnitus. There are so many reasons for tinnitus, not just the classic "inner ear wear and tear" which is what the dipstick I saw thought.
Think of it like this. If someone has an amputation, sometimes they can still feel as though the limb is still present (phantom limb). It really isn't, it's obvious even to the individual that it isn't, but for some people, they still feel it, whilst for others, there is no such sensation - all this is down to how the brain interprets the input from the nerves. Tinnitus is very similar, it is the brain sensing inputs that are either not there, or erroneous. In a "normal" situation, the brain recognises that they aren't really there and just deletes them without ever sending them on to your conscious brain, so you don't notice, whilst for tinnitus suffers, you become aware of them.
I also have a "normal" audiogram, in fact, it is more typical for someone ten years younger than me without tinnitus. My tinnitus was induced by an allergy, not ototoxicity in the true sense, but an allergic response to a prescription drug that somehow scrambled my brain - somehow this explains why my tinnitus can vanish sometimes.
Your audiogram could be perfectly normal for a number of reasons, but it is in my opinion most likely because of the following:
You do not hear one frequency with 1 hair, there are multiple hairs that cover multiple frequencies - this is a fact. As such, even if 50% of the hairs die that hear a frequency, the other 50% can still pick up on it and hence hear it, even if the others are sending phantom signals. Also, the delicate hairs can be damaged, but not die, that will allow them to receive signals, but potentially also give out phantom signals.
The good news is that at least with a healthy audiogram, there is more opportunity for the outside world to help mask the noises and also, there is also still plenty of time for it to sort itself out.
It could well be that in 70% of cases, he gives this cocktail early on and 3 months later 70% are better, but would have been anyway - for a number of people, it does sort itself out within a few weeks.
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