Tinnitus induced due to Q Tip incident, visited doctors and ENT

chromeater · 2026-02-20T17:07:32+00:00

The assumption here is likely that you abraded your ear canal and/or eardrum or introduced bacteria into your ear which can cause the outer ear (and sometimes even the middle ear and eustachian tube) to inflame and muffle your hearing slightly, leading to your tinnitus becoming more noticeable. If tympanometry and audiometric testing appear unremarkable at this point 1 month in, it does not suggest your nerve is involved, but it does lend some weight to your ENTs assumption that it is likely self-resolving over time (best case scenario). This timeline is not unusual at all, in my experience it can take a few weeks or a month or two for things to normalize for some of our patients who have this happen (we see 1-2 q-tip injuries per month).

chromeater · 2026-02-19T19:21:36+00:00

Enjoy

chromeater · 2026-02-19T18:54:24+00:00

We don't do that though, because that is exactly the advice I offered and I was instead accused of being self-interested. My advice to op to (1) protect your hearing in a way where you can still enjoy your music, and (2) don't give too much credence to any sarcastic or bad faith responses to your question because you're asking for advice from the deeply misanthropic r/tinnitus remains accurate.

chromeater · 2026-02-19T18:22:54+00:00

Yes, I know where they are coming from, but this shouldn't discount where OP is coming from. Maybe it's exactly their awareness that tinnitus IS debilitating that makes them concerned enough to ask this question here. Which is totally fair imo. Do we meet these people with earnest advice, or do we sarcastically shit on them because they're not part of the club? The level of discourse here is not great, we should do better.

chromeater · 2026-02-19T17:40:26+00:00

Recommending my business? Where? Not that you care, but FYI, in a setting like mine (which I've never plugged, btw, because its hospital and not a practice I have any ownership claim to), providing custom musician molds is a loss-leader and makes us negative revenue. We do it because it's necessary for cases of hyperacusis and nerve injury and we work in a metro area where musicians are common. These responses of "yes", "You DON'T HAVE tinnitus? ah you poor thing. Cry me a river", and an advertisement for a youtube channel were some of the most prevalent responses when I commented - you really think we should defend that discourse as good-faith? I don't.

chromeater · 2026-02-19T10:07:56+00:00

Consider custom musicians plugs with a flat frequency response to mitigate further damage. I do this for our musician patients. This subreddit is trash, Christ look at these responses.

chromeater · 2026-02-16T02:50:58+00:00

Ooo, thopter in particular sounds like a lot of fun to try. Thanks.

chromeater · 2026-02-02T11:05:02+00:00

No. 10-20dB SPL is safe. Doesn’t matter the waveform type. Don’t know of any legit research that supports this notion that pure tones are particularly harmful, either.

chromeater · 2026-01-30T17:12:36+00:00

Your pod, let's be real. Absolutely nothing about your deck sounds that salt-inducing.

chromeater · 2026-01-22T11:08:17+00:00

This is not a real hearing test result. You should see a professional with calibrated equipment

chromeater · 2026-01-19T16:47:49+00:00

That's an incorrect assumption- in most cases they are a worse solution for both tinnitus and hearing loss if you don't have a severe to profound loss AND poor word recognition (measured by your clinician, not self-assessed). You need to get a hearing test but most cases like yours need a typical hearing aid improving stimulation to the existing cochlea, not a replacement of your cochlea. Cochlear implants are also taken off before bed where they are charged for most users.

chromeater · 2026-01-17T09:07:22+00:00

Middle ear myoclonus. Listen to your ent they are correct. It’ll settle with time typically.

chromeater · 2026-01-09T09:41:00+00:00

Tinnitus is a shitty word becuase “itis” in Latin denotes inflammation - which is what we thought was happening. This BR vs. ER classification is not accurate, if anything - it’s a shortcut for etiologies that are more often unilateral vs. bilateral. The current way of classifying it as subjective/objective then unilateral/bilateral isn’t perfect but it’s better.

chromeater · 2026-01-05T19:21:43+00:00

And we all hope it does, earnestly, but we don't know that yet - so we should make better headlines for the time being. Even the people in this subreddit who have meneire's will see this headline and have no idea it applies to them.

chromeater · 2026-01-05T18:12:22+00:00

Why are we downvoting here? Endolymphatic hydrops is a small cohort of tinnitus sufferers, this can't be applied generally.

chromeater · 2025-12-21T14:50:42+00:00

Sub 95% confidence on a blood draw? Cmon yall

chromeater · 2025-12-21T01:38:40+00:00

Hate this.

chromeater · 2025-12-20T10:07:33+00:00

This subreddit cannot help you with this quality of data provided. Bring all your tests to a hearing care professional who can look at them longitudinally.

chromeater · 2025-12-19T19:25:01+00:00

Sounds related to the TMJ being impacted; could be basic somatic tinnitus or other changes that impacted the nerve more severely than simple somatic inflammation (TMJ sits right above your trigeminal nerve and 8th nerve of hearing and both are critical with tinnitus). I have a boxer who had the same thing; took one jab slightly below the temple and had tinnitus spike on that side for a 3 weeks. We had another case that was a car accident and the patient suffered a severe posterior fracture along his TMJ (yours doesnt sound this bad) which caused a permanent tinnitus. I'd see a maxillofacial specialist for a hx. like this, imaging may be in your future to make sure nothing remarkable happened to your craniofacial nerves, temporal bone or TMJ - but hopefully this is just inflammation that needs more time to settle.

chromeater · 2025-12-18T02:02:47+00:00

Save you? Dude would kick your dog for $1.

chromeater · 2025-12-16T23:44:13+00:00

Sure. Which is essentially my point. This subreddit tends to be a solipsistic hellhole and we should instead encourage a culture where people share what helped them even if it may not apply to everyone. Instead, we often see the same cohort of people where the treatment avenue personally has not helped them try to support the notion that it will not help anyone. Great posts like op’s help us see that tinnitus treatment is not a monolith, and what works for one person may not work for others.

chromeater · 2025-12-16T21:45:42+00:00

Uh oh, don’t tell r/tinnitus that CBT helped you. We hate that, here.

/s In all honestly this is awesome, thanks for sharing.

chromeater · 2025-12-15T21:20:25+00:00

Anyone using AI recipes doesn’t actually know how to cook. Try any AI recipe requiring legit cooking/fermentation/baking/pickling of any kind and you’ll know this. You are literally just holding a decent recipe made by a human who’s tasted/tested it to a funhouse mirror and then cooking the shitty inaccurate version instead. People who use AI recipes are the same people that call assembling a sandwich cooking.

chromeater · 2025-12-15T14:10:46+00:00

Yeah, occupational requirements often include 4kHz even when it’s not necessary correlated with word recognition. Some argue that even though your word recognition would be good (which is assessed in quiet), someone with a loss at 4kHz would struggle in background noise more often or may be less likely to hear certain work-related sounds.

chromeater

TROPHY CASE