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BBC One’s ‘Dr Xand’s Con or Cure’ features so-called ‘cures’ for tinnitus

This week, episode 5 of BBC One’s ‘Dr Xand’s Con or Cure’ featured how tinnitus sufferers can be exploited with so-called ‘cures’.  Tinnitus is a condition that affects one in seven people in the UK. It’s often described as a ringing in the ears, but for many it is a debilitating condition leaving them desperate for a cure. But when no cure actually exists, they can be left spending money on one con after another.

21-year-old student Caris Lount said on the programme, ‘if you are desperate enough, you can fall for these tinnitus scams.  Growing up with tinnitus was very isolating.’  She sought advice from her doctor who told her that what she was hearing was called tinnitus. 

Nara Orban, ENT Consultant and ENT UK Assistant Honorary Secretary shared the following with viewers, ‘tinnitus really is the presence and the perception of sound in the absence of there being any noise on the outside. So, it’ll be something that you can hear, and this is genuine, this is not something that your mind is playing tricks on you. Your ear is really generating this extra noise that your brain then perceives.  But of course, it is not a noise from outside. The truth of it is that we don’t know entirely why some people get it and some people don’t.’ 

For Caris, the ringing became unbearable, and she was fixated on trying to find a cure, and that’s when she went online.  As she explained to viewers, ‘I wanted to find the easiest way out from my tinnitus, and I thought that removing my earwax was exactly that’.  Caris tried olive oil eardrops but when that didn’t work, she found an earwax syringe with five-star reviews online claiming to cure tinnitus.  She used the syringe every day firing a jet of water into her ear. When she saw no wax coming out she pressed harder and harder but still no wax came out.  Thankfully Caris stopped using the syringe after calling her doctor and now understands that it was going to do more harm. 

However, she couldn’t escape these so-called ‘cures for tinnitus’ because they kept being advertised on her social media.  She found an ‘100% cure for tinnitus’ advertised online which was a plastic bottle filled with leaves for £250. She also came across tinnitus patches you put behind your ear, labelled as a ‘cure,’ with over 1,000 five-star reviews. 

Andrew Swift, ENT Consultant and ENT UK President said ‘well sadly, there is no cure for tinnitus.  A lot of the time it’s down to hearing loss, and hearing loss happens naturally with age. If you’ve worked with loud noise, that’s another potential cause of it. And then you’ve got traumatic causes where people have had a bad head injury or a very loud explosion noise.’ 

Andrew explained the importance of keeping noise around you in managing tinnitus adding ‘If you’ve got hearing loss as well, a hearing aid is very effective. Tinnitus maskers are similar, but they look like hearing aids. And then most NHS audiology departments offer a full service for tinnitus sufferers and that includes tinnitus therapy and counselling.

Andrew confirmed to the programme, that if you stumble across a tinnitus cure online it is a con.

Watch the full programme, Series 2: Episode 5 of Dr Xand’s Con or Cure on BBC iPlayer. 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001vx4d/dr-xands-con-or-cure-series-2-episode-5