Tinnitus Retraining Therapy

Tinnitus retraining therapy (TRT) is a form of habituation therapy designed to help people who suffer from tinnitus. TRT uses counselling to explain to the patient how a combination of tinnitus retraining and sound enrichment can end their negative reaction to the tinnitus sound, and then reduce and eventually end their perception of it. Frequently, noise generators are used in TRT to provide a background noise level. This therapy offers hope to sufferers who are willing to take the time and make the effort to learn and implement it.

If a patient has successfully habituated using TRT, the perception of tinnitus frequently returns to the previous level of awareness before perception became problematic.

In terms of the most powerful drugs that induce tinnitus, they are cisplatin, quinine, and salicylate (aspirin). An administration of salicylate in high doses will always induce tinnitus.

A basic understanding of the Jastreboff model, the Heller and Bergman experiment, and how sound is perceived in the auditory cortex via the subconscious auditory neuronal networks are helpful starting points for someone wishing to begin working with TRT. Two components that follow the model of tinnitus that are essential is (1) counselling and (2) sound therapy. Counselling tries to reclassify tinnitus to a category of neutral signals and sound therapy attempts to weaken the tinnitus related neural activity. The use of a portable music player as a control instrument in TRT has produced successful results in recent analysis, offering patients a more cost-efficient treatment.