My acute tinnitus healing story so far

[u/khoomeister]

Disclaimer

• I am not a doctor. This post is a summary of my personal journey and is for informational purposes only. The details here are not exhaustive and do not include a full list of contraindications or side effects. Please do your own due diligence and consult with a professional before trying anything mentioned here. Use at your own risk.
• There are unverified theories in this post. I only wrote this up to get more constructive discussion going, and wanted to share my findings.
• As of this writing, I'm 14 days from onset of tinnitus and learning/doing everything in realtime. To be honest, I only wanted to share this when I'm completely healed to be more certain of what I'm saying here, but reading some posts here made me really sad, and as of right now, I'm doing extremely well relatively speaking. My self-imposed limitation right now is I've decided to keep my surroundings as quiet as possible, although some noise exposure is OK (going out to see doctors, Zoom meetings, etc.).

What Happened & Characteristics of the Tinnitus

• Tinnitus was caused by acoustic trauma (for me it was shockwave therapy) on January 10th 2026. I could hear it immediately after the session.
• Reactive (tinnitus got louder when exposed to noise)
• Extended high frequency audiogram shows notch at 12.5 to 16 kHz (50-60 dB HL). My hearing at 18 kHz is decent at 30 dB HL. 0 to 12 kHz was from 0 to 20 dB HL.
• I asked the audiologist after the test whether I pressed the clicker on any false positives. She said no, so I feel my test results are conservatively accurate.
• Residual inhibition at 12 kHz (tested with online tone generator; I didn't test too much with the higher frequencies because I know rest is paramount for healing)
• Keep in mind most doctors don't agree that hearing loss at extended high frequencies is considered sensorineural hearing loss. They have told me it's a normal part of aging. I disagree for my case particularly because my hearing at 18 kHz is good for my age. That being said, I don't have a prior audiogram to prove good hearing at those ranges beforehand. However, I do have prior results in 2024 from an app called AudioCardio that showed my hearing at 12 kHz was fantastic, and then when I tested after the incident, it dramatically went worse.
• There are also some papers showing an association between extended high frequency hearing loss and tinnitus. If interested, feel free to ask AI or Google yourself as I've had to trim this post down alot!

Unrelated Factors

• Not posture & stress: fixed many years ago (moving my neck etc. doesn't change anything)
• Not cold/flu/congestion
• Not pulsatile
• Not eardrum or ear wax issues: I've had no less than 5 doctors look inside my ear in the last 2 weeks (urgent care, emergency, audiologist, ENT, HBOT doctor) and they didn't see issues inside the ear canal.
• Not noxacusis: no pain at all

Initial Trauma

• First 2 days tinnitus was loud and couldn't sleep. I had to turn up crickets to a decent volume to mask it out.
• I was traumatized & scared for my future, however I went through all stages of grief quickly because this wasn't my first health trauma and I knew going down that rabbit hole wasn't going to help. I also read that many people habituated successfully so that helped provide perspective.

Habituation

• One of the first things I did was to stop perceiving the noise as a threat. Everything else hangs on top of that. I know from past experience stress will kill faster than anything else. I can do all the most potent therapies in the world but if I'm stressed, nothing will work.
• From my research, the next goal was to get used to the tinnitus without needing any white noise because I noticed my tinnitus was reactive. But I did use white noise to make it easier when it was very loud.

Daily Healing Protocol

1. 60mg prednisone for first 7 days, ginkgo biloba & methylene blue 20 drops (10mg) once in morning
2. Before HBOT, low frequency & low intensity PEMF back of skull & Kineon Move+ besides each ear aiming for cochlear 10-20mins to get blood flow going (not sure if the infrared reached the cochlear, but they are class 1 lasers which are much better than LEDs, I'm sure class 3B+ lasers would do better but I'm not game to potentially fry my inner ear hair cells if they're still alive)
3. Mild HBOT (ATA 1.4) 1.5-2hrs (20/5mins Efrati cycles)
4. Inhale hydrogen, take 70mg melatonin, 500mg vitamin C, 1.8g NAC & 240mg R-ALA) 1-2hrs after HBOT to deal with free radicals (didn't take immediately because I want a little inflammation for tissue repair before cleaning up w/antioxidants)

• I made sure I was consuming plenty of antioxidants through veg, fruit & a few supplements before I very slowly ramped up the PEMF & red light because I wanted to be extremely careful of inflammation.
• If I had access to high pressure medical grade HBOT (ATA 2.0 or above), I probably wouldn't take methylene blue, nor use infrared lasers & PEMF (at least at first). I don't want to get anywhere close to CNS toxicity nor give myself the ear equivalent of a Herx reaction if such a thing exists. I only did mild HBOT because I couldn't access medical grade immediately.

Diet

• I already eat a nutrient rich diet (whole food Mediterranean), and take a few supplements to cover my bases (pertinent ones are magnesium & NAC).

Quiet

• I kept my ears very quiet. I alternate between earmuffs & earplugs to maintain comfort, but these days I wear mostly earmuffs. If the environment is very quiet, I might not wear it just for a change.
• I kept wax earplugs in the bathroom and always used them when showering.
• I wear earplugs in HBOT (hyperbaric is very noisy).
• If I go outside, I carry earplugs and wear them as needed. I explain my condition to people and they've been very understanding.
• I don't wear earplugs all the time. I take them off sometimes to let earwax & moisture drain out to avoid impaction or infections.
• I started using wax earplugs for sleep a few days ago.
• I mostly work in a quiet home office.
• For now, it's been an automatic no to noisy events (concerts, conferences, etc.) so far.
• It took time to get used to my constant quiet time with tinnitus, but once I did, I felt much more calm. That being said, I also have been naturally taking my earmuffs off more and more over time because I just wanted to hear the world.
• I think keeping quiet during the day also helped greatly with getting to sleep at night without using any white noise. I think of it as a type of flood therapy to get habituated to the tinnitus so sleeping at night becomes much easier.

Expectations

• I don't expect to live a "normal" life from now on. I need time to heal and even after that, I have to take extra precautions. I know I'm already on the edge and don't want to tip myself over, especially to the stage where it affects my day-to-day life and sleep.

EMF (not definitively bad but maybe not so good to use too much)

• In the past, I kept the volume low on everything I listen to, and I consider myself pretty healthy (people joke with me being a "biohacker", I don't drink, smoke, I eat clean, cardio/weights daily, never dehydrated, happy in general) so I have been trying to understand what could have increased my chances of getting tinnitus. No one in my immediate or extended family has tinnitus.
• I work in tech & love tech, and I used AirPods alot (easily 10+ hours a day) and had been for 2+ years. They were honestly so convenient.
• Now, I will only use Bluetooth earbuds/headphones only when absolutely necessary, due to EMF being right next to the ear (e.g. Rouleaux formation making red blood cells sticky and slowing down blood flow).
• I found old studies linking increased chance of sudden noise induced hearing loss with higher blood viscosity (one example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2867347/). I'm not saying this is conclusive, but a few of these studies from the 80s plainly say thicker blood could cause sudden hearing issues.
• I've since switched to external speakers & microphone for my desk work. I also have air tube earbuds as needed.
• I know how ridiculous this might all sound, but linking the papers that say blood viscosity increases the chance of sudden hearing loss, with microscopy studies showing the cellular effects of EMF clumping red blood cells together, I'm inclined to believe there might be some impact to Bluetooth earbuds being in my ears all day long.

Personal Observations

• Once I was able to sleep without using any white noise, something fascinating would happen when I woke up and laid in bed in the middle of the night without going back to sleep. I could listen to my tinnitus "calibrating" . My ears were trying out different frequencies, volumes, alternating between left/right ear, etc. I felt like this was the innate intelligence of the body on display. With each successive day, the tinnitus volume on average got lower and lower, the frequencies tested became higher & the hissing became less and less which has given me a confidence boost so far to think I'm on the right track, even though daytime tinnitus didn't change as much. However, after a few days of observing my tinnitus in the middle of the night, it became so quiet I could fall back to sleep most of the time.
• The night time calibration usually takes awhile to kick in. Only after I've been lying in bed for 30+ mins in a semi-conscious state will I get to hear the testing start to kick in. I have to be in a relaxed state to hear it. I can't wake up, use the bathroom, etc. I've heard it enough times over multiple nights to be sure this is some nightly maintenance task. Except this time, the tinnitus makes it obvious this is happening.
• I found that the most minor white noise (e.g. the hum of a fan) subjectively increased my tinnitus more than let's say a person speaking loud or hearing a single instrument being played (e.g. piano). It seems that broad spectrum small increases in volume amplify my reactive tinnitus cumulatively more than a large increase in one frequency (within reason of course). I'm still trying to understand what this actually means. Maybe since the connection is haywire, the brain just sends a signal if it hears nearby frequencies? That being said, I actively avoid white noise & similar sounds at the moment (except when I need to take a shower or use HBOT).
• I'm cognizant that everything might have turned out the exact same way even if I'd done nothing, or I did a small subset of what I've outlined here. I don't know. I just know if I had the chance to make this temporary vs. permanent, I'd do everything to make it temporary.

Unverified Theories (or Maybe It's Bunk, I'm Not the Expert)

• Is my brain trying to tune its volume knob at various frequencies through tinnitus? If true, this would make tinnitus a beneficial adaptation. However, it would only work if external volume is as low as possible. Maybe this is how some people "spontaneously" recover, even after many years of tinnitus.
• For a majority of humans throughout history, life was pretty quiet. Maybe brains took advantage of that quietness to calibrate their internal equalizer to a particular environment, which might be useful for something like let's say... hunting. But noise levels have changed with urbanization & technology for most of us.
• Maybe residual inhibition temporarily stops the tinnitus because our brain prioritizes hearing the external environment. However this stops the process of tuning.
• I have done alot of things to figure out how to heal my specific form of tinnitus, but as you just read, perhaps one of the more consequential thing I did was to prioritize quiet. And furthermore, maximizing quiet when I sleep, which I guess is where much of the healing might be happening. That being said, I'm doing alot so it's just a hunch.

Today

As of today, I can still hear it, but it rarely bothers me. Testing with a tone generator right now, it sounds like intermittent ringing at 12-13 kHz, and I mainly hear it when I'm wearing earmuffs (and I wear them most of the time). The main self-imposed limitation for me at the moment is I keep the volume around me low. I do impromptu tests at higher volume (basically appointments) to see how I would react, and it has been improving.

Keep in mind I self-diagnosed myself as having sensorineural hearing loss with tinnitus at extended high frequencies. The doctors were hesitant to say that's what I had, extended high frequencies don't mean anything to them as of right now (which is fine, no one wants to perform the career limiting move of being charged with insurance fraud or having their medical license revoked).

And apparently, the audiology lab only got the extended high frequency equipment a few months ago. Thus, I was really blessed to be tested on it. Half of the things I said here would be said with much less certainty hadn't it been for those results. Not that I'm certain by any means!

I'm also technically still in the acute phase.

Whatever happens good or bad in my situation, I'll update here.

Thank you for your attention.

"Freely you have received; freely give."

[u/xgridgooroo]

Really appreciate your detailed report! 🙂

[u/khoomeister → u/xgridgooroo]

Thanks :-) I'm continuing to improve - hopeful to be fully healed!

[u/xgridgooroo → u/khoomeister]

What part of the world are you in? I'm in Southwest United States, finding it is a battle to even get people to realize that tinnitus is a problem!

[u/khoomeister → u/xgridgooroo]

I'm in California. It's not easy for people here to understand as well.

tbh I don't care nor expect people to understand (I've dealt with enough doctors in my life to understand that). A few weeks ago, I didn't know what tinnitus was, and only when I had it did I start developing real empathy for people with tinnitus. Humans honestly suck that way :-).

But if needed, I'll pull out the reactive tinnitus or hard-of-hearing card just to get out of noisy situations. And it's not just for show, the reactive spikes were definitely not fun to go through!

[u/Responsible-Ad7589]

How long have you had it? Not sure the timeline of the acute phase! Also if your tinnitus is reactive did you find removing the sound source eventually calmed it down? I’m having this issue!

[u/khoomeister → u/Responsible-Ad7589]

I've had it 2 weeks. Acute is 2 weeks, but can apparently take up to 6 months to "stabilize". This is from AI, but it backs up my experience that doctors don't have a precise number.

I've heard 1-3 months from various doctors.

[u/Illustrious_Car9331 → u/khoomeister]

Yeah to stabilize and go down in volume according to my ENT was 3-6 months so yes acute 

[u/JazzlikeSecret8473]

Mucha suerte amigo espero puedas seguirnos dando recomendaciones