MemberI'm not sure this is the right place for this, since it isn't really a tinnitus treatment per se, but it is a real treatment for something that is in many way similar.
I know people have compared tinnitus to a kind of phantom limb pain (in some cases) and I was reading this article in The New Yorker and though how nice it would be if there were a way to find a therapy that worked as well for our phantom sounds "pain" as the mirror treatment works for phantom limb pain.
It's a rather long, but I think worthwhile read. It does, briefly, mention tinnitus. It is about sensory perception originating in the brain rather than in peripheral nerve endings (which may have been long since out of order). Here is a little excerpt:
Such findings open up a fascinating prospect: perhaps many patients whom doctors treat as having a nerve injury or a disease have, instead, what might be called sensor syndromes. When your car's dashboard warning light keeps telling you that there is an engine failure, but the mechanics can't find anything wrong, the sensor itself may be the problem. This is no less true for human beings. Our sensations of pain, itch, nausea, and fatigue are normally protective. Unmoored from physical reality, however, they can become a nightmare: M., with her intractable itching, and H., with his constellation of strange symptoms—but perhaps also the hundreds of thousands of people in the United States alone who suffer from conditions like chronic back pain, fibromyalgia, chronic pelvic pain, tinnitus, temporomandibular joint disorder, or repetitive strain injury, where, typically, no amount of imaging, nerve testing, or surgery manages to uncover an anatomical explanation. Doctors have persisted in treating these conditions as nerve or tissue problems—engine failures, as it were. We get under the hood and remove this, replace that, snip some wires. Yet still the sensor keeps going off.
So we get frustrated. "There's nothing wrong," we'll insist. And, the next thing you know, we're treating the driver instead of the problem. We prescribe tranquillizers, antidepressants, escalating doses of narcotics. And the drugs often do make it easier for people to ignore the sensors, even if they are wired right into the brain. The mirror treatment, by contrast, targets the deranged sensor system itself. It essentially takes a misfiring sensor—a warning system functioning under an illusion that something is terribly wrong out in the world it monitors—and feeds it an alternate set of signals that calm it down. The new signals may even reset the sensor.
The mirror treatments seems like such a simple/easy-to-do solution, but it works so well. There is so much we just don't know about the brain and nervous system. Who knows what might help tinnitus one day
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/30/the-itch
I know people have compared tinnitus to a kind of phantom limb pain (in some cases) and I was reading this article in The New Yorker and though how nice it would be if there were a way to find a therapy that worked as well for our phantom sounds "pain" as the mirror treatment works for phantom limb pain.
It's a rather long, but I think worthwhile read. It does, briefly, mention tinnitus. It is about sensory perception originating in the brain rather than in peripheral nerve endings (which may have been long since out of order). Here is a little excerpt:
Such findings open up a fascinating prospect: perhaps many patients whom doctors treat as having a nerve injury or a disease have, instead, what might be called sensor syndromes. When your car's dashboard warning light keeps telling you that there is an engine failure, but the mechanics can't find anything wrong, the sensor itself may be the problem. This is no less true for human beings. Our sensations of pain, itch, nausea, and fatigue are normally protective. Unmoored from physical reality, however, they can become a nightmare: M., with her intractable itching, and H., with his constellation of strange symptoms—but perhaps also the hundreds of thousands of people in the United States alone who suffer from conditions like chronic back pain, fibromyalgia, chronic pelvic pain, tinnitus, temporomandibular joint disorder, or repetitive strain injury, where, typically, no amount of imaging, nerve testing, or surgery manages to uncover an anatomical explanation. Doctors have persisted in treating these conditions as nerve or tissue problems—engine failures, as it were. We get under the hood and remove this, replace that, snip some wires. Yet still the sensor keeps going off.
So we get frustrated. "There's nothing wrong," we'll insist. And, the next thing you know, we're treating the driver instead of the problem. We prescribe tranquillizers, antidepressants, escalating doses of narcotics. And the drugs often do make it easier for people to ignore the sensors, even if they are wired right into the brain. The mirror treatment, by contrast, targets the deranged sensor system itself. It essentially takes a misfiring sensor—a warning system functioning under an illusion that something is terribly wrong out in the world it monitors—and feeds it an alternate set of signals that calm it down. The new signals may even reset the sensor.
The mirror treatments seems like such a simple/easy-to-do solution, but it works so well. There is so much we just don't know about the brain and nervous system. Who knows what might help tinnitus one day
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/30/the-itch
