Steve Donnelly

Behind Tinnitus Relief Guide

About

IT audio technician, suburban Nashville. Forty-nine years old. Twenty years of live sound setups and conference room AV work, not one day wearing hearing protection, and now a permanent high-pitched ringing I can hear in a completely quiet room.

The tinnitus started about three years ago. I noticed it first on a Sunday afternoon in the garage, a faint hum that didn't match any appliance or HVAC cycle I could identify. I spent a couple of weeks treating it like a troubleshooting problem: checked the wiring, checked for electrical interference, eliminated sources one by one. Then I sat in my car in the driveway with the engine off and realized the sound was still there. It was coming from me.

My audiologist confirmed it at the next appointment: noise-induced tinnitus, consistent with long-term occupational exposure. She was matter-of-fact about it. There is a specific kind of irony in being the audio tech who now has a feedback loop problem he cannot patch out.

The supplement testing started a few months after the diagnosis. Same approach I use for audio troubleshooting: establish a baseline, introduce one variable, observe long enough to distinguish a real pattern from random variation. I track ringing severity daily on a rough 1-10 scale, note sleep quality, flag anything that looks consistent across multiple weeks. Over a dozen products tested across three years. Most produced nothing I could separate from placebo. A few shifted things in ways I could actually document. One made mornings noticeably worse for three straight weeks before I traced it to a specific ingredient overlap. All of it is in the notebook.

Keisha, a project coordinator I work with, spotted the notebook during a conference room AV setup and asked what I was tracking. When I explained the scoring system, she asked better questions about the methodology in five minutes than I had thought to ask myself in six months. "Are you controlling for stress?" was the one that stuck.

Daily tracking for three years after two decades of accumulated occupational exposure is the credential here, not a medical degree or audiology license. Anyone dealing with persistent tinnitus should be working with a qualified audiologist. Their expertise covers causes, diagnostics, and treatment options that no supplement log addresses. What this site adds is something narrower: documented personal experience with the supplement category, written down week by week and published without editing the results to fit the label claims.

My wife says I am more obsessive about this than I ever was about work tickets. She is probably right, though I would argue the noise floor is more personally relevant.

Written by Steve Donnelly

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