Treatment Eases Tormenting Ringing in the Ears

Barbara Cooke says the phantom noise she hears is "like when you put a conch shell to your ear."

She is not talking about a sunny, sandy, soothing surf sound. What the busy Center City, Penn., grandmother experiences is more like a tidal wave -- an inescapable roar that drowns out everything else.

Cooke, 71, has tinnitus, the perception of sound in the absence of an environmental source.

An estimated 50 million Americans have this spooky, incurable problem, which is growing, especially among veterans and aging baby boomers. Most people adapt and stop noticing it. But Cooke is among the hapless 10 million or so who are tormented and exhausted by it.

"It was so sudden," she recalled of the onset of her tinnitus late last year. "It drove me crazy. I was probably close to suicidal. I just sat and cried."

The good news is that helpful therapies are available. Cooke is getting relief from one of the newest, developed by Neuromonics Inc. of Bethlehem, Pa. A portable, customized audio player, combined with counseling and monitoring by an audiologist, aims to retrain the brain to filter out the noxious stimulation.

"I can still hear it, but it doesn't bother me anymore," Cooke said last month at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital's Balance and Hearing Center.

Audiologist Elizabeth Gray smiled and said, "Your brain is changing its perception."

Tinnitus -- from the Latin word tinnire, meaning "to ring" -- plagued Van Gogh, Beethoven, Oscar Wilde, and more recently Rosalynn Carter, David Letterman, and William Shatner, to name a few.

In many cases, including Cooke's, tinnitus accompanies hearing loss, a fairly inescapable part of aging. But it can also be triggered by head injury, ear infections, jaw dysfunction, medicines ranging from chemotherapy to aspirin, and a bane of modern society: loud noise.

Tinnitus has become an active area of research over the last 20 years, yet scientists cannot completely explain the phenomenon. One theory is that the inner ear's sound-receiving cells become injured, so they can't properly send signals to the auditory nerves.

In any case, tinnitus -- like pain -- is highly subjective. The pitch, loudness, frequency, and type of sound vary from patient to patient.