Tinnitus following head injury

Comment by Chad J. Dupuis, L.Ac.

In general you will need to be far more patient. You gave your ENT 3-4 years to help you, while your condition didn’t improve at all and you give your acupuncturist 24 days. Clearly this is not fair to your practitioner - although I do understand that this is affecting your life.

Tinnitus is generally treated well within Chinese Medicine (acupuncture and/or herbs depending on the case), but with a head injury, particularly when young, it can obviously be far more difficult. On our tinnitus treatment meta page under the “patterns” section you can see there are a number of them listed and these are just the more common possibilities (see What Does Acupuncture Treat? - for more on pattern diagnosis in Chinese Medicine). Some of these have more details with regards to acupuncture on our acupuncture for tinnitus page.

If what I’m reading is correct and your current acupuncturist is asking to see all the reports from the ENT, it seems like they are following the appropriate process and you should likely stay with them. Treatment for a condition that has gone on this long is, generally, 1 month for every year of the condition - so you would be on a path that would likely be no sooner than 6-9 months and possibly as long as 9 months to 1.5 years.

Much can be done but without any reasonable organic findings by your ENT it is initially a lot of trial and error to figure out what may have happened and find the avenues to help.

Comment by Archived User

In my opinion, herbal treatment (or herbal treatment with acupuncture) is a much more proactive approach to resolving tinnitus with lasting results. Kidney channel issues are for the majority of cases caused by chronic Spleen deficiency and overwork, worry, and anxiety in our post-modern lifestyle among developed nations.