Hearing Aids: A Cure For Tinnitus?

Tinnitus affects over 50 million people living in the US, according to the American Tinnitus Association, and it can be extremely irritating and annoying to live with. The sound can be incredibly difficult to live with and adjust to hearing. Tinnitus is often referred to as being like a ringing in your ears and is symptomatic of an issue with the auditory pathway within the ear. In addition to the symptoms of tinnitus, research shows that the majority of people living with tinnitus also have hearing loss at some level.

It can be difficult having to manage both tinnitus and the associated hearing loss, in addition to the impact both may have on your quality of life. Especially as there’s a common misconception that tinnitus is all in your head, when actually this isn’t the case at all.

Unfortunately, there is no cure for this condition, but there are a number of treatment options that focus on reducing the severity of the condition and help to make managing on a daily basis a little easier. One of these treatment options is the use of hearing aids. Do hearing aids help tinnitus? If so, how do they help to make living with tinnitus easier and more manageable?

Tinnitus and Hearing Loss Go Hand in Hand

Studies show that around 90% of people living with tinnitus also have hearing loss, which means that you aren’t just dealing with one hearing problem, essentially, you’re dealing with two different conditions. Adjusting to living with two different hearing issues isn’t easy, especially when they can have a big impact on your quality of life. The good news is that clinical evidence shows that wearing hearing aids can be beneficial for people living with tinnitus.

Can Hearing Aids Help?

Studies have shown that hearing aids can offer a whole range of benefits to people living with tinnitus and associated hearing loss. Hearing aids can, of course, improve overall hearing quality. By improving the quality of sounds from outside the ear, hearing aids can remove focus away from the sounds caused by tinnitus. This can help to improve quality of life.

Then there’s the fact that hearing aids can make maintaining sensory perception easier, in addition to making understanding language more manageable. Because sound quality is restored, this means that any auditory deprivation is reduced, this can help to make understanding language easier and can also make communication easier.

Tinnitus noises can be extremely irritating, which is where a hearing aid can come in handy. Some hearing aids are designed to offer white noise to the wearer; this can be used to reduce the sound of tinnitus, drowning it out with white noise. Hearing aids with tinnitus sound-masking can be extremely beneficial and can have a big impact on your quality of life.

There are hearing aids available that are, in essence, smart hearing aids. These hearing aids can be programmed and controlled by an app on your smartphone, which puts you back in control of your hearing and allows you to easily adjust your hearing aids as and when you need to.

Studies have shown that hearing aids, combined with other forms of sound therapy can help to retrain the brain. This sound therapy uses specialist techniques that utilize external sounds to teach the brain how to mask tinnitus sounds and make them less noticeable, and thus easier to live with. The therapy teaches the brain that the sounds to focus on are the ones that are from an external source, rather than the ones that come from inside the ear.

Will Hearing Aids Cure Tinnitus?

The fact is that there’s no cure for tinnitus. It’s a condition that currently can’t be cured. However, there are treatment options available, including the use of hearing aids to help improve and manage quality of life when living with tinnitus.

There are also a range of other treatment options available when it comes to managing tinnitus. If you want to learn more about the options for managing tinnitus, it’s best to make an appointment to speak to your audiologist about the options available to you.

Find out more about how hearing aids can help make living with tinnitus easier by contacting the Rametta Audiology & Hearing Aid Center today at Tarentum: (724) 409-4439 or Vandergrift: (724) 567-3233.