There Is Always Hope: My Experience with Tinnitus and Osteopathy


By Theresa Cameron ATA member since 2014


My experience with tinnitus began when I was just twelve years old. I was lying in bed, just about to drift off to sleep, when I heard a faint ringing noise. I got out of bed to tell my mother but was promptly sent back to my room with the assurance that the noise would go away. This was one of the few times my mother was wrong.


The ringing did not go away. In fact, over the following months it became louder and multi-tonal. I also began to experience bouts of rhythmic click- ing noises. I was filled with anxiety and greatly perturbed by these noises that only I could hear.


In tandem with the problems I was experiencing with my ears, I had also developed a severe case of scoliosis. As my spine continued to twist and my body became more and more misaligned, the sounds in my ears changed and multiplied. At age thirteen I had surgery to correct my scoliosis through the insertion of metal rods that attached to my spine. After this surgery, my tinnitus tem- porarily stopped changing. It didn’t get any better but I was relieved that at least it wasn’t getting any worse.


Unfortunately, at age twenty-eight, my tinnitus began to change again. It started to slowly increase in volume, bringing back old feelings of dread and anxiety. I tried to remain calm— I knew that stress could contribute to increased tinnitus symptoms—but the volume continued to grow. After several months, I began to experience hyperacusis, an extreme sensitivity to noise, which worsened until I couldn’t stand even the sound


12 Tinnitus Today | Summer 2014


of plates being stacked in the cupboard. Soon, every noise I heard was followed by a painful reverberation of sound inside my head.


Around this time I had to quit my job due to increasingly severe pain and bouts of dizziness. I took to my bed and soon found that my upper body had become locked in place—I couldn’t turn my head to either side, could barely open my mouth, and could no longer lift my arms over my head. My tinnitus had become so loud that I was running several fans throughout the house, day and night, in an attempt to block it out. At times my left ear would be filled with a whoosh- ing noise that pulsed in time with my heartbeat, and I would occasionally hear high-pitched tin- kling noises when I touched my left ear. I had a lot of trouble sleeping and every waking moment became an experience of the most acute misery.


I knew that I needed help. I consulted a general practitioner who suggested that I had allergies, but all my allergy tests came back negative. I then visited an ear specialist who performed an ear exam and ran a series of hearing tests. He determined that I had early-onset hearing loss and that nothing could be done for me. When I tried to differentiate between losing my hearing and having my hearing impaired by tinnitus, I was told that these conditions were one in the same.


It was at this time that a friend urged me to visit an osteopathic doctor. Following this suggestion changed my life.


Osteopathy is a widely accepted form of comple- mentary and whole-body medicine that focuses specifically on the body’s musculoskeletal system. Osteopathic physicians emphasize the importance of restoring and maintaining normal body mechanics as a key to most health conditions.


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