We talked about how Cognitive Behavioral Therapy was very helpful to many tinnitus sufferers in one of our previous articles, and one of the suggestions that was made in that article was to see if you could find a tinnitus support group in your area.  Since that article, we have done more research on tinnitus support groups, so we wanted to post this article on why finding a support group can help you to cope with tinnitus symptoms.  Research shows that sharing your issues with others alone can help, but by joining a support group you can often learn more about yourself, but you can certainly learn more about how others are learning to cope with their tinnitus symptoms.

Tinnitus Support Group
(dbsaoregon.org)

Here is what Sarah Pusateri had to say about tinnitus support groups in a recent article at wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu.

Sal Gentile says sometimes his tinnitus sounds like bacon frying in a skillet.

Other times it’s hissing – like air out of a popped tire. Or it can sound like conveyor belts, or rough ocean waves.

On his worst days, Gentile says, it’s a combination of these things – a cacophony of sounds within his head.

“I was scared. I was devastated. I had no idea what was going on,” he says.

Tinnitus is the phantom perception of a sound that does not exist in the outside world.

Gentile was out for his birthday at a noisy restaurant more than one year ago, when he says he first started hearing strange noises.

“When I came home, I had all these sounds coming out of my ear,” he says.

He soon learned his condition wasn’t uncommon. Experts say 15 percent of the population has some sort of tinnitus.

That’s 60 million people in the U.S. alone, according to Dr. K. Paul Boyev, associate professor at the Department of Otolaryngology at the University of South Florida.

He says there are two types of tinnitus, with different causes.

“It can be sounds that are created by vascular structures such as blood moving through blood vessels,” he says.

“Then there are sounds that originate usually in your nervous system, usually in your auditory pathways that process sound.”

Gentile suffers from the latter. He thinks his tinnitus was most likely caused by hearing loss.  You can read the rest of the original article here.

Most people hear from their doctor or through research that there is no cure for tinnitus, and they immediately shut down and give up, rather than work through their tinnitus symptoms.  Believe it or not, many tinnitus sufferers are able to learn to heal themselves and thus their tinnitus.  This does not necessarily mean that their tinnitus is not there any longer either, it simply means that through learning to cope with it, that they can learn to block it out and not allow it to affect their life any longer.

Tinnitus is really an underlying symptom of some other problem in your body, and if your tinnitus is caused by something other than hearing damage, which many times is the case, then you can often reduce the severity of your symptoms.  Stress and diet can play a major part, so learning to reduce the stress in your life and changing your diet can often lead to remarkable improvements, so don’t give up.  Do some research and see if you can find a tinnitus support group in your area.  You might be surprised at how much it helps.  In the end, you too might discover why finding a support group can help you cope with tinnitus symptoms!