Ringing in the ears – what is tinnitus?

Word tinnitus comes from latin "tinnire" which means "to ring" or "to shrill". Thus tinnitus (Tinnitus Auris, Tinnitus Aurius or Tinnitus Aurium) is in general ringing, whistling, buzzing, hissing, humming, chirping or swishing, which one hears constantly or during significant time period (at least 10 minutes) in his head or in his ears. Other people either don't hear this sound in no way (subjective tinnitus), or, in some rare cases, it is measurable by apparatus (objective tinnitus).
About tinnitus symptoms, or better to say, about consequences on life of tinnitus sufferers I write in text Tinnitus symptoms and in serie of articles on Tinnitus suffering.

An epidemic of Tinnitus?

History of tinnitus has five thousand years. Tinnitus was known in antiquity, we find references to it already in Mesopotamia, on ancient egyptian papyruses or in texts of Aristotle and Hippocrates.
With the coming of modern times and with the beginning of the use of firearms and gunpowder, and later with expansion of machine production, the general noise of human environment has steadily increased. In present time we can see wide spread of hearing loud music and even overall fascination with loud noise. So we could say, that today we have the highest noise level in history of human civilization. And inappropriate exposure to loud noise is main cause of tinnitus (see articles about acoustic trauma), thus with overall growth of noise in our environment rises also number of people suffering tinnitus. Actually we could speak about epidemic of tinnitus.

Tinnitus causes

According to contemporary scientific knowledge tinnitus is symptom, thus only side effect of some disease or damage of hearing apparatus. So far it is not clear, how tinnitus arises. There are some common causes of tinnitus:

• most often it is a form of acoustic trauma – when one is exposed to noisy explosions (fireworks), fireshots, loud music (rock concerts, techno parties and nightclub sessions), noisy machines (motorcycles without exhaust mufflers, F1, Dragsters), noisy factory machines, constant workplace noises etc.
• various ear infections
• head injury
• barotrauma
• hypoxia
• diseases of ear apparatus, spine problems, diseases and defects of nervous system
• consummation of some medical drugs or event sweetening agents

I will provide detailed description in section Causes of tinnitus. If you find, that nothing of mentioned is your case and yet you hear ringing in the ears or other noises in your head, then you should visit a doctor, because it is possible, that something of it was neglected in the past.
From the foregoing also results that hearing loss and tinnitus are closely connected. Tinnitus sufferer often has partial hearing loss. Sometimes he is not conscious about it, because it relates to high frequencies, which usually do not exist in our surroundings, but nevertheless is such hearing loss measurable. More about this in article Hearing loss.

Tinnitus treatment

There are multiple treatments and methods, through which medicine strives to help tinnitus sufferers. It requires separate section Tinnitus treatments to handle this theme. In general it is valid, that if cause of problem is not clearly defined, any treatment will be questionable. If someone has tinnitus as a result of spine deformity, then after fixing it also tinnitus will disappear. Likewise, if cause of problem is an ear infection, then after healing this infection will ringing in the ears (or whatever other form tinnitus has) automatically stop. But, if no such root cause of tinnitus has been diagnosed, then probably no effective treatment exists for this specific case and, unfortunately, only various means of temporary relief are available.

Tinnitus therapy

Because of this missing of real and effective treatment, tinnitus therapy could bring sufferers at least temporary relief or adaptation to tinnitus. This issue I handle in Tinnitus therapy section.