Reviews of TrebleHealth’s Youtube Videos on Tinnitus

This page will offer detailed reviews of a Youtube channel that I watch intensively since developing my own mild case of tinnitus (ringing in the ears).

Why???

• Tinnitus is a fascinating mystery despite all of the science we have. There isn’t even remotely an agreed-upon cure.
• In my earlier years I studied and wrote intensively about repetitive strain injury — the infamous carpal tunnel syndrome — related to my years of computer use. And tinnitus is like a ‘worser’ (sic) case of the limits of the current state of medical science. At least with carpal tunnel I feel like I got to the bottom of the matter and determined that it’s mostly overuse, compounded by static positions, and the whole downstream sequelae (great word, eh?) that follows. In the matter of repetitive strain, medical science knows all the facts… it’s just not able to deliver solutions because of lots of structural problems. But tinnitus… the best they can tell us is that the auditory cortex of the brain is reacting to hearing problems, and um, you need to um… they don’t know. Maybe try sound therapy and give lots of money to various mental health therapists.
• Treble Health offers a great body of work on the topic, interviewing many practitioners and patients. But 1) I think I started getting locked out of their Youtube comments, and 2) as helpful as Youtube’s comments are, they are the typical social media nightmare. What’s the right analogy?: some excellent ‘needles’ hidden in the world’s biggest haystack??? And 3) TH’s videos always use clickbait titling that makes a game out of figuring out what each video has to offer.
• Finally, by compiling these reviews I hope to organize more of the precious-few answers about tinnitus in one place.

My Summary of Tinnitus Solutions

Prior to this page, I did attempt to organize the solutions I’ve encountered thus far:

https://medium.com/@jackbellis/understanding-tinnitus-solutions-from-recent-sufferer-who-is-a-techwriter-d4c17359f242

Reviews

Julian’s Simple Rule To Stop Tinnitus 98,302 views Feb 14, 2021

• There is no “simple rule” in the video or its transcript. I’ve never listened to the ‘podcasts’ that Ben occasionally mentions, but perhaps that phrasing is in a fuller audio-only version.
• The visitor expert advocates 2 things: 1) cranio-sacral therapy, which is a weird massage practice that might have simple down-to-Earth validity, but seems to be more often debunked as bullshit and medical fraud. Ben is careful to say that massage is only relevant to some causes of tinnitus. 2) He has 20 ways to say “acceptance” (of your tinnitus)… from relaxation to distraction to focus. TH’s main message is ‘habituation,’ which is hardly different from acceptance.
• But I did like Julian’s point that the brain is constantly filtering out (ignoring) background sounds, such as our heartbeat, or traffic. The clear implication is that we should have it in our power to get our brains to filter out the tinnitus sound. I have no reason to dispute this. (At least until my tinnitus gets worse and I jump off a bridge.) In fact, I only learned at age 68 (!) that my 95-year-old mother says she’s had tinnitus since developing scarlet fever as a child!!! She says she’s just learned to accept it as “her sound.” Yikes.