For anybody suffering with tinnitus I highly recommend the protocol William Shatner went through. You can train your brain so it’s not noticeable any more. Like wearing pants, it fades into the background.
I had tinnitus in my left ear, but it turned out to be related to TMJ, and it resolved after I wore an advanced lightwire functional (ALF) appliance for maybe 3-6 months to move my jaw back into a forward position. I had braces and wore headgear as a kid at the height of some 1980s hysteria about overbites that left millions of people like me with class II malocclusion (baby face) and sleep apnea.
I'm having trouble finding information on it, because there's a lot more money in orthodontics than palatal expansion:
Right now I'm wearing Invisalign but have a small 1/2 tooth gap where the new bone has formed and am having trouble finding an orthodontist that will move molars forward to catch up. It's like asking someone who just dug a giant hole to fill it in again. It may require a temporary anchorage devices (TAD) or lever arm to move the teeth without tipping them.
The programmer in me senses a code smell here where the orthodontics profession maybe shouldn't endorse practices it can't undo. But all I can really do is spread the word and encourage anyone considering braces to get a second opinion, especially for children. They may just need to wear a retainer for a year or two and learn good tongue posture habits, especially while they're still growing.
Any suggestions for someone with an overbite? I went to some orthos who recommended removing two premolars, others suggesting jaw surgery. in the end I went to elastics + invsialign though I can't seem but to feel that the elastics are doing nothing
Just ask yourself: does the encouragement of such non-holistic practices as removing healthy teeth sound more like science or quackery?
To shed some light on what's going on here, I feel that the Herbst appliance is the best up through the late teenage years, but notice how info on it is behind a kind of industry blacklist:
As of this writing on Easter Sunday, April 17, 2022, the above Wikipedia entry is blank. That's what I mean about the programmer in me smelling so many code smells here that something doesn't add up.
IMHO what's going on is that the practice of orthodontics was created before things like dental implants went mainstream or were even thought feasible. So today, rather than headgear, it's better to just install the temporary anchorage devices (TAD) that I mentioned, then use a more consistently-applied force from bands or screws to move any tooth exactly where it needs to go. I feel that orthodontists who are reluctant to do this haven't kept up with the literature, or are afraid to do work outside of the niche they're comfortable in, indicating that their professional development work might have fallen behind.
In short, get a second opinion and/or find a better orthodontist.
But it sounds like you're on a good track. Just remember that you're moving roots (not teeth), so bigger teeth take longer because they have more. Also you're moving a lot of teeth, so each one has to move a millimeter, then the next, and so on. So molars may take an order of magnitude longer to move than smaller teeth.
I'll likely need one of these techniques to close my gaps, even though they're from new bone growth from the ALF instead of lost teeth:
I've read there are mouth shapers that full your jaw forward that significantly helps with sleep apnea. but at the same time it kills your bite, and reforms your jaw.
any recommendations?
tangentially I also have tinnitus so now I'm wondering if it's related.
Hmmm, I've not heard anything re: bite killing. It's definitely had points where it affected my ability to chew due to things shifting, but that's been easily countered each time by my Ortho just shaving down or adjusting the appliance - it's been due to my bite putting more pressure on the left or right row as I adjust. Other than that, over ~6 months so far I haven't really had much to note. I just wear it while sleeping and periodically while coding (since I'm not needing to talk during that... it's like "free time" for it to work) and it "just works".
Quality of sleep is through the roof, I'd forgotten what good sleep is like. If I miss a night of sleep with it (e.g, I travel and forgot to bring it with me) I absolutely feel it the next day.
Tinnitus-wise, I noticed that it got worse at first but then settled and is actually more in the background than it used to be. FWIW, I've had tinnitus for as long as I can remember, so I'd consider myself ~90% habituated to it - it doesn't bother me outside of any concern of it getting worse. I think this has made it easier for me to objectively judge whether something is helping or not - if my tinnitus is never cured, but never gets worse, I'll be fine.
https://vivos.com is what my Ortho got me on. I can't speak to others, but this has worked well for me so far.
Sorry, poor wording on my part, I meant something related to a bad bite (like TMJ). I had worn a joint on one side like a bad knee, but not the other. So the ALF realigned my bite by making room for the teeth to be where they wanted to be, so the joint could open back up. Good point though, my situation might be something unrelated, and I don't know if there's a correlation between TMJ and tinnitus.
Berard Auditory Integration Training and the Tomatis Method are also worth looking into depending on what's going on; a book called "Hearing Equals Behaviour: Updated and Expanded" goes into detail on the above treatments.
The Tomatis Method is a little pseudoscience-y for my tastes -- you have to buy the tapes / app / etc. directly from the Tomatis folks, and I've never seen any good studies from a non-conflicted third party that support its efficacy.
All of the science and math behind the algorithms are available - you can recreate it yourself, but like most things it's easier to buy what someone else has already put the work in. I'd recommend getting and reading the book to balance out a perspective.
Thanks for the pointer, I'll be looking it up shortly.
Anecdotaly, I've found myself getting a phantom tone in the 15khz range (sounds just like a flyback) when in a quiet house. This could be entitely placebo effect, but I've gotten some relief by doing a bad emulation of active noise cancelling headphones, namely
playing a quiet 15khz (ish) tone through my bone conduction headphones. It's not perfect by any means, but often the very act of trying to tune my tone generator to the right frequency can be enough to stop it annoying me (it becomes less noticeable).
I developed it as a kid, and even though I feel a lot of anxiety in life, I don’t feel anxious about it.
Maybe it’s easier for us to accept certain things when we are younger. if it happened today I probably would be more anxious about it. It also helps that mine hasn’t gotten worse - I noticed it, took corrective action, and continue to be mindful about it thru today
I'm not them. But in my case, meditation and being mindful made it worse. Browsing a ton of social media and being perpetually distracted in the attention economy's exploitation has helped me.
