[timlod]

I've had Tinnitus since I was 14 (when I went to a concert and stood in front of the speakers).

A couple of pieces of advice to people who might be struggling with their tinnitus:

1. You need to learn to cope with it - once you're used to it, it will mostly fade into the background and be manageable. Accepting that it'll never be silent again was very difficult, but that's the only thing hat helped me feel better in the end.

2. Wear ear plugs when it gets too loud! It's too easy to get irreversible damage to your hearing, and that's the only thing you can really do - prevent it.

Curiously, yesterday I woke up at night because the tinnitus had gotten louder again - stupidly, I played drums the other day at a jam session without earplugs. I could punch myself for that one, and see it as (yet another) wakeup call to be more careful.

[jchook]

Is tinnitus really just "freaker by the speaker" syndrome?

[Gare]

Prolonged exposure to loud sounds, short extremely loud sounds (explosions), ototoxic drugs (some antibiotics, chemo..) and substances (toluene..) and viral infections that spread into inner ear can all cause cochlear damage and therefore tinnitus.

[collyw]

Covid vaccines as well.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8788157/

I know, I am a heretic for drawing any negative attention to our savior from the deadly pandemic.

[dahart]

Covid vaccines do sometimes lead to increased tinnitus symptoms. But you can’t draw any conclusions from that, because getting COVID often leads to increased tinnitus. I’m not sure whether it’s known yet, but it very well may be that on balance there are fewer cases of tinnitus associated with the vaccine than with the virus. Also, BTW, flu vaccines and catching the flu both have reports of tinnitus increase. My theory: any inflammation event may be likely to increase tinnitus symptoms.

[collyw]

What difference does it make if covid causes it? Most people took the vaccine, pretty much everybody got covid anyway. The vaccine was voluntary (with a lot of unethical coercion).

[dahart]

What do you mean what difference does it make? Isn’t it clear that you cannot attribute tinnitus to the covid vaccine, if the covid virus (or any virus, or any vaccine) causes tinnitus as much or more often than the vaccine does?

If the per-capita rate of onset tinnitus symptoms when getting the vaccine is lower than the rate of onset tinnitus when catching covid, then the vaccine isn’t just not implicated, it’s effectively helpful at reducing tinnitus, as a byproduct of reducing cases and/or severity of covid illness.

[Gare]

I got vaccinated three times (with Pfizer). No ill effects on my hearing/tinnitus (I was monitoring it). Then I got COVID (Omicron), was quite sick for several days (lost smell) and it seems the tinnitus worsened a bit in one ear. So... your mileage may vary, as with everything.

[collyw]

Th vaccine worked well then. Let me guess, it would have been so much worse without it...

[Gare]

I cannot test that counterfactual now, can I?

But some people had it worse, so I guess it didn't hurt. And it is probable that vaccines protected me from original strains, which were worse.

If anything, I'm dissapointed that they didn't develop vaccines for new strains soon enough.

[philjohn]

No - I had tinnitus from when I was quite a young child.

As OP said though - it's a case of, if you focus on it, it'll weigh you down.

[Naijoko]

No. Many people got it because of burn out stress for example.

[collyw]

Earplugs often give me tinnitus when I am wearing them.

[timlod]

They do make the tinnitus more noticeable for sure! By blocking out sounds which would otherwise “mask” the tinnitus, it can become noticeable if it’s otherwise pretty quiet. But in conditions where you really need earplugs I think you still won’t really notice it that much when wearing earplugs (very loud situations).