A lady asked me about a reported new drug cure for tinnitus. She wrote,

I wonder if you’ve heard anything about Caroverine? What are your thoughts?

She referred to an article published in Hearing Review on January 19, 2012 (1). This was in turn picked up from an article published back in November, 2010 that began, “Lincoln Pharmaceuticals Ltd. (LPL), an Ahmedabad-based drug manufacturing firm company today announced that it has launched Caroverine injection under the brand name ‘TINNITIN’ which is India’s first drug to treat Tinnitus – a disease commonly known as ‘ringing in the ear’.

The company developed Caroverine injection under research and development collaboration with Phafag AG, a Switzerland-based drug manufacturing firm, a release from LPL said.” (2)

Here are my thoughts. Like all the other tinnitus treatments out there, this drug treatment works for some people and not for others. Furthermore, it doesn’t cure tinnitus as such, it just reduces it while you are taking this drug. When you go off the drug you can expect your tinnitus to come back.

However, Caroverine should not be taken in the long term as it has other side effects on your body. Basically it is a Glutamate antagonist. “Glutamate is very important to many bodily functions and must not be inhibited long-term. Glutamate is an amino acid and one of the most important building blocks of proteins. It is also vital for metabolism and brain function.” (3) Therefore, if you suppress too much glutamate activity in your body or brain, nasty things will happen.

Thus, in order to be effective, researchers have to find a way to make this drug only work on the glutamate receptors in the auditory circuits and not everywhere else in the body. (Researchers are currently trying micro-catheters but these have their own problems.)

I find it interesting that although this drug has been around and used for about 40 years, it is still not approved in the USA—the drug capital of the world. That alone, should tell you something about the safety/efficacy of this drug.

If you want to learn more about tinnitus and what you can do to help bring it under your control,  check out the new 5th edition of “When Your Ears Ring! Cope with Your Tinnitus—Here’s How“.

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(1) First Pharmaceutical Cure for Tinnitus Reportedly Launched in India. Hearing Review Jan 19, 2012.

(2) Lincoln Pharma launches India’s first drug for Tinnitus. November 16, 2010.

(3) Barry Keate. The Promise of Caroverine for Tinnitus.

A lady wrote,

I have had tinnitus for several years. It seems to be a genetic disorder as my mother and brother both suffered from it as well. I worked in the music business for years and always attributed it to the exposure to loud music and extended use of Aspirin. Both my brother and mother had heart issues. Is tinnitus related to heart disease? Also, what would cause an increase in the sound of tinnitus?

I’ve never heard of tinnitus being genetic. Rather than your family’s tinnitus being genetic, you could all have tinnitus because of similarities in your environments, lifestyles or upbringing that result in tinnitus. When that happens, it is easy to think that tinnitus might be genetic.

Being around loud music can and does cause tinnitus. So can taking a lot of Aspirin. Fortunately, tinnitus caused by Aspirin is typically temporary.

Furthermore, tinnitus can be related to heart issues—depending on the type of your tinnitus. For example, if your tinnitus pulses in unison to your heartbeat, you have a vascular kind of tinnitus called pulsatile tinnitus. High blood pressure or clogged arteries in your neck and head can cause this kind of tinnitus.

If you have heart disease and take heart medications, one of the side effects of the heart drugs can be tinnitus.

There are many factors that can cause your tinnitus to increase in volume. For example:

— being around louder sounds
— taking any of the more than 500 drugs known to cause tinnitus
— increasing hearing loss
— stress
— anxiety
— eating certain foods
— various diseases such as allergies and diabetes
— ear infections and other ear conditions, and so on.

If you want to learn more about tinnitus and a number of things you can do to help bring it under your control,  check out the new 5th edition of “When Your Ears Ring! Cope with Your Tinnitus—Here’s How“.

Numbers of people find their tinnitus, or the loudness of their tinnitus, is related to stress. I hear from people all the time who tell me that when their stress increases, so does their tinnitus.

Researchers have found the same thing. Writing about people with tinnitus, one researcher recently noted, “On a stress free day, their tinnitus may be manageable and unnoticeable. In the presence of a stressor, their tinnitus returns. It is widely known that stress, even if it may not be the main cause of tinnitus, precipitates and/or perpetuates tinnitus. Thus, teaching patients how to manage their stress more effectively is an important component of a tinnitus treatment program.” (1)

Thus, one of the effective things that you can do to help bring your tinnitus under control is to learn to control your stress. There are many different techniques you can use to help reduce your stress. Discover which works the best for yourself and watch the stress-induced component of your tinnitus “melt away” as you learn how to “hang loose”.

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(1) Herzfeld, Melanie and Francis Kuk. 2011. A Clinician’s Experience with Using Fractal Music for Tinnitus Management. The Hearing Review. Vol 18, No 11, October 2011. p. 55.

A man wrote,

I noticed an ad in the current issue of Hearing Health magazine for Arches Tinnitus Formula. Has anyone had success with this product? The absence of a company address in the advertisement makes me wary.

It seems any magazine ad I see for a tinnitus remedy offers only a toll free number. When I call the number, my experience is that the price of the product is sky high and any questions about the formula will be brushed off because the formula is proprietary.

I realize some people do experience success using a homeopathic product, yet I’m also aware that the American Tinnitus Association has stated there is no medical cure for tinnitus.

I agree with you. I like to see people stand behind their products with full contact information prominently displayed. However, sometimes ads are cramped for space so they leave this information off. The good news in this case is that if you go to the Arches website you will find their contact information—name, address, phone number and the name of the person behind this product—namely, Barry Keate. (I’m well aware that there are other tinnitus products being hawked that have no such contact information on their websites—and of those I am really leery.)

More good news. The ingredients for Arches Tinnitus Formula are not proprietary. In fact, there are only three common ingredients in the Arches Tinnitus Formula, namely, zinc, garlic and Ginkgo biloba.

The interesting thing about their Ginkgo content is that this is one tinnitus formula that actually contains a therapeutic dose of Ginkgo, in contrast to many other tinnitus formulas out there that only contain a token amount of Ginkgo. (This is one reason that so many studies of Ginkgo as a remedy for tinnitus have not shown positive results—the researchers deliberately or through ignorance used an inadequate dose in their studies.)

For example, a German Commission did a detailed study on Ginkgo and determined that the therapeutic dose was 480 mg a day—and that the Ginkgo had to be standardized to 24% flavone glycosides and 6% terpene lactones.

Guess what? The Ginkgo content in Arches Tinnitus Formula is standardized to exactly that. Furthermore, their recommended dose is 480 mg per day—exactly the amount the German Commission found was needed for an effective therapeutic dose.

Even though the Arches Tinnitus Formula contains a therapeutic dose of Ginkgo, you need to realize that Ginkgo doesn’t work for everyone’s tinnitus. Ginkgo taken at the effective dose of 480 mg per day helps between 26% and 82% of the people taking it, depending on which study you look at. This is not to say that everyone’s tinnitus goes away completely, but taking a therapeutic dose of Ginkgo does help reduce the tinnitus in numbers of people—and any reduction in tinnitus volume/annoyance is a blessing to be sure.

Arches Tinnitus Formula is not a homeopathic product—it is a supplement type of product. In my opinion, it is one of the better herbal tinnitus products available. Sure it will cost you—about a dollar a day—but what drugs are that cheap?

There is no single magic pill that will cure tinnitus. The best approach is to try several things at once or sequentially—and hopefully each will help reduce your tinnitus a certain amount so that you end up with a significant reduction in your tinnitus. I give many of these tinnitus reduction strategies, including using Ginkgo and other herbals and minerals in my tinnitus book, “When Your Ears Ring! Cope with Your Tinnitus—Here’s How“.

A lady explained,

A horrible, loud explosion woke me up last night and made me scream out a bit. It was really scary! Has this ever happened to anyone else?

Fortunately, what you experienced is quite rare. It goes by the ghastly-sounding name of “Exploding Head” syndrome.

In spite of its grisly name, your head doesn’t really explode—you just hear a loud exploding sound—much like you did. This can occur as you are coming out of a deep sleep. It can certainly scare you and set your heart to pounding.

In my book, “When Your Ears Ring! Cope with Your Tinnitus—Here’s How” I explain:

“Exploding Head” syndrome is a relatively rare event in which you experience a very loud and sudden noise such as a loud bang similar to a bomb exploding, a gun going off, a clash of cymbals, a door slamming, a roaring sound, waves crashing against rocks, loud voices or screams, a ringing noise, a terrific bang on a tin tray, the sound of electrical arcing (buzzing) or any other form of loud, indecipherable noise that seems to originate from inside your head. It most often occurs just before deep sleep (and sometimes upon coming out of deep sleep) and wakes you up.

If you are interested, you can learn more about the strange kinds of tinnitus some people experience in this book. You can get your own copy here.

A recent MarkeTrak study revealed some interesting things about tinnitus and its effects on our lives—what we can do to help ameliorate the effects of our tinnitus and where hearing aids fit into the equation. (1)

But first, some background on tinnitus. Tinnitus—ringing in the ears—affects a LOT of people— somewhere between 30 and 50 million people in the USA alone.

The older we get, the more likely we are to experience tinnitus. (1) For example:

Notice that by the time people reach 55, at least one person in five has tinnitus. This rises to one person in four for seniors. That’s a lot of people living their lives listening to the phantom racket we call tinnitus.

Tinnitus affects the quality of life for many people. A study of 3,431 people with tinnitus (1) revealed:

(Note: these figures add up to more than 100% because tinnitus often affects several aspects of a person’s life at the same time.)

The good news is that almost half of the people with tinnitus report it does not affect their lives at all. Basically, they just ignore their tinnitus and live happy and fulfilled lives in spite of the racket in their ears. I’m one of these. Sure, sometimes I wish my tinnitus wasn’t there, but I choose to ignore the constant tinnitus I experience and live my life as though it didn’t exist.

That’s a bit of background on tinnitus. Now, let’s look at how we can help bring our tinnitus under control. One of the treatments that few people apparently consider to help bring their tinnitus under control is simply getting and wearing properly-fitted hearing aids.

In a study of 1,314 people with tinnitus, 52.4% found that wearing hearing aids didn’t make any difference to their tinnitus. That’s the bad news. However, looking at it the other way, the good news is that if you have tinnitus you have approximately a 50-50 chance that wearing hearing aids will help reduce the impact of your tinnitus. Any treatment that has a 50% chance of helping you is definitely worthwhile trying!

Here’s a note of caution: If you have tinnitus, you still have to be careful when wearing hearing aids because the above study further revealed that 4.2% of the people with tinnitus found that wearing hearing aids actually made their tinnitus worse. If you are one of these unfortunate people, you need to keep the volume on your hearing aids set to a level that doesn’t provoke your tinnitus. If that won’t work, you probably should not wear hearing aids.

However, the good news is that 43.5% of the people found that wearing hearing aids helped mitigate the effects of their tinnitus. Here’s the break-down of the results: 15.7% of these people reported a mild reduction in their tinnitus; 14.1% reported a moderate reduction in their tinnitus; and the really good news was that 13.7% reported a significant reduction in their tinnitus. (1)

How often did this reduction of tinnitus occur when wearing hearing aids? Of the 553 people that reported an improvement in their tinnitus when wearing their hearing aids, here’s the break down:

Notice that almost 2 out of 3 people reported that wearing their hearing aids gave them reduced tinnitus most or all of the time! That’s impressive for any tinnitus treatment.

Now here’s the best news of all. 3.4% reported that the improvement in their tinnitus continued even when they took their hearing aids off! (1)

With results like these, if you are bothered by your tinnitus and you have some degree of hearing loss, you owe it to yourself to try hearing aids and see whether they will help your tinnitus too.

This study also looked at the various things people tried in order to reduce their tinnitus. Of the 3,473 people in this study—all of whom had tinnitus—notice that only a miniscule 6.1% tried wearing hearing aids in an attempt to reduce their tinnitus. This shows how foreign it is to people’s thinking that hearing aids are an effective way to help control tinnitus. Now that you know the truth, don’t make the same mistake.

Here’s the break-down of the various ways people tried to reduce their tinnitus.

Notice the low percentages of people with tinnitus that tried each of these various treatments—the highest was only 6.8%. The total only adds up to 33.9%. Assuming each person only tried one treatment (and this is not likely), this study reveals that only one person in three even tried to help themselves deal with their tinnitus.

Why is that? Could it be that because many doctors tell people suffering from tinnitus that there is no cure for tinnitus, and that they have to live with it—thus leaving them without any hope—that these patients buy into this dismal mindset and thus don’t believe there is anything they can do to help reduce their tinnitus, and so they give up and do not try anything?

If you have tinnitus, don’t believe this. Yes, it is true that at the present time there isn’t a cure for everyone’s tinnitus. Yes, it is true that you have to deal with your own tinnitus. However, it is not true that there is nothing you can do that will help reduce your tinnitus. Do not give up hope. There are many different things you can do to help yourself deal with your tinnitus. Wearing hearing aids is just one of them. You can read about many more in my book, “When Your Ears Ring! Cope with Your Tinnitus—Here’s How“.

Now, back to this study. What were the results of the various things people tried? I have broken them down into three classes no improvement (0%), modest improvement (1-39%) and significant improvement (greater than or equal to 40%). I think these results will encourage you.

Notice that roughly somewhere between one-third and three-quarters of the people found no help with any of the above treatments. That does not mean that these treatments don’t work—just that they don’t work for numbers of people. The good news is that between one-quarter and two-thirds of the people that tried these various treatments did receive help. So these treatments DO help many people. The trick is to find which treatment or treatments work for you.

Now let’s look at the results again, but this time just zeroing in on the results of the highest level in the significant improvement category—namely 80%+.

If you could reduce your tinnitus volume and the impact it has on your life by 80% or more, that would be a real blessing, right? How many people were so “lucky”? Here are the results.

Notice that wearing hearing aids tops the list with 27% of the people that tried wearing hearing aids had a greater than 80% reduction in their tinnitus! That’s impressive. (Remember, that only 6.1% of the people in this study tried hearing aids.)

If these results hold true for all the people with tinnitus, then 13.5 million people in the USA alone would find that wearing hearing aids would reduce their tinnitus by 80+%. Millions more would find that wearing hearing aids would reduce their tinnitus by a lesser amount. Thus, if you have a hearing loss—even a mild one—wearing hearing aids should rank high on the list of things you try to reduce your tinnitus.

As I have said many times in the past, tinnitus arises from a number of different causes and affects people differently, thus a treatment that works for one person won’t necessarily work for another. The results in the various (above) tables prove this.

Since there is no single treatment for tinnitus that works for everybody all the time, and since there are many different treatments that do work in reducing tinnitus for some people, you need to try a number of them and see what works for you. If something doesn’t work for you, try something else. Unless you try, you’ll never know which treatment might reduce your tinnitus by 80% or more.

What have you got to lose? There IS something that will help you. You need to find out what it is and do that. A good plan of attack is to try several different tinnitus reduction treatments at the same time. Together they may make a significant reduction in your tinnitus. Some of that reduction may come from wearing hearing aids. Additional reduction may come from using relaxation techniques, and further reduction may come from taking herbals, or receiving counseling or wearing sound generators or listening to background music, or…the list goes on and on.

Based on the above study, if you are bothered by your tinnitus and have a hearing loss, you may find considerable relief from your tinnitus through the simple expedient of wearing hearing aids.

Note that the degree of your hearing loss and the severity of your tinnitus “are significantly related to the level of tinnitus reduction via hearing aid use. In general, people with milder degrees of tinnitus are more likely to experience mitigation of their tinnitus with hearing aids.” (1)

One final word of advice—you need to be properly fitted with hearing aids. One of the results of this study indicated that “people receiving a more comprehensive hearing aid fitting protocol are nearly twice as likely to experience tinnitus relief from their hearing aids than if they received a minimalist hearing aid fitting protocol.” (1) Don’t skim over the above sentence too fast. You need to insist on a complete and comprehensive audiological evaluation AND careful hearing aid fitting backed by real-ear measurements in order to get the best tinnitus-reduction results. When you do that, you’ve just doubled your chances that wearing your hearing aids will bring you significant tinnitus relief.

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(1) Kochkin, Sergei, et. al. MarkeTrak VIII: The Prevalence of Tinnitus in the United States and the Self-reported Efficacy of Various Treatments. The Hearing Review. Vol. 18, No. 12. November, 2011. pp. 10-26.

A lady wrote,

I have an acoustic neuroma (since 1992) and have profound hearing loss on one side but extremely sensitive hearing on the other side as well as bilateral tinnitus. I would love to be able to show people what tinnitus sounds like. Do you know of any videos/DVDs that may be available. I would greatly appreciate your assistance.

I can’t say that I know of available CDs/DVDs that contain tinnitus sounds, but tinnitus sounds are available on the Internet. Following are the links to two websites that have a variety of tinnitus sounds.

http://www.ata.org/sounds-of-tinnitus

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpEuzOtc9LE

I think both of the above websites use the same basic files—but they present them differently.

Now you can let people hear a few of the many different tinnitus sounds. If you have the volume up when they listen to them, it should drive them “buggy”. Some are pretty piercing. Then just say, “This is what I have to listen to every minute of every day—and here you can’t even stand it for a few seconds!” That should get their attention.

If you want to learn more about tinnitus and what you can do to help bring it under your control,  check out the new 5th edition of “When Your Ears Ring! Cope with Your Tinnitus—Here’s How“.

For the past few months I have been hard at work researching the latest findings on how tinnitus develops and more importantly, what we can do to help bring our tinnitus under control.

The result of all this work is the completely revised, updated and expanded 5th edition of my book “When Your Ears Ring! Cope with Your Tinnitus—Here’s How“. This new 5th edition is 60% larger than the 4th edition as it contains so much new information regarding tinnitus.

If your ears ring, roar or rumble, now’s your chance to get a copy of this new edition and save yourself some money in the process. For you loyal readers of the Hearing Loss Help eZine, you can save 25% off the regular price of $22.49 if you order it now.

To get this special price, you must do two things. First, place your order for this newly-revised tinnitus book before midnight October 8th. Second, be sure you put the coupon code “tinnitus5″ in the shopping cart’s coupon box upon checkout and click “apply”.

To get your copy of this newly updated and expanded book at your special price click here.

Note: this offer is only good for the printed version of the tinnitus book (the eBook version has not yet been updated).

A lady explained,

I just wanted to send you this link to see if you have seen this before and if it is anything worth looking into for my tinnitus. I’m very hesitant.

I checked out this website. This website is basically a high-pressure sales website that is long on hype and short on facts. (In fact, I couldn’t find a single helpful fact regarding tinnitus on this website at all.) All they sell you for $37.00 is an eBook that is only 25 pages long—and written in very large print—otherwise it would only be about 10 pages long.

I downloaded and read through the entire “book” in about 7 minutes. That alone tells you there is not a lot of information in it—to put it mildly.

Much of the information in this “book” is probably good, although the details are skimpy. I have never come across some of the so-called “popular” cures for tinnitus like putting 2 or 3 onion juice drops in your ears. Thus, I have to wonder just how popular and effective this method really is. I’ve never come across this “cure” before, and I’ve been researching and writing about tinnitus for a good number of years.

One of the “cures” it lists is ear candling. It touts ear candling as an “old home remedy” that “can be extremely effective”. The truth is that ear candling is a known quack “cure”. It does not work, and furthermore, it can harm your ears if you “slip up” and let hot wax get in your ear canals.

This “book” recommends getting more exercise, watching your diet, cutting down on alcohol and coffee—things like that. None of these things are bad in themselves, but do not cure tinnitus in most people. If they did, the cure for tinnitus would be within easy reach of every person and no one would be complaining of their tinnitus.

This “book” does not cite any research, or contain any references, so you cannot check things out for yourself.

Personally, I think you could spend your money much better elsewhere. I know I just wasted my money.

If you want to learn more about tinnitus and what you can do to help bring it under your control, you would do much better to check out “When Your Ears Ring! Cope with Your Tinnitus—Here’s How“. Not only is it much cheaper, packed with solid information to help you, but it also contains 7 pages of references so you can check things out for yourself.

A man asked,

In September 2011, after drinking with friends, we went to a bar and just before we left, there was a very loud song. When I came out of the building, I heard loud tinnitus in my right ear. I didn’t realize it was a big issue and went to the doctor’s three days later. The doctor said I had sudden hearing loss, and I received treatment for the next two months. The medicine the doctor used was mainly trophic nerve, anti-coagulation and vasodilation medicine. The result is not good—my hearing loss only improved from 80+ dB to 70 dB.

My questions are:

1. Is there any possibility that I can further improve my hearing?

2. Apart from the tinnitus, I have another problem that bothers me even more that the hearing loss and tinnitus. My right ear is very sensitive to certain sounds/noises, for example noisy crowds of people and the noise from plastic bags. When I hear the noise, my tinnitus will get much louder than when I am in a quiet environment. My doctor said there is no good method to cure this except to let my body heal itself. Do you have any suggestions?

There were a number of factors that set you up for your hearing loss and tinnitus. First, loud sounds, whether music or noise can damage your ears and cause your ears to ring. I doubt that this was the first time your ears ever rang after being in a noisy bar. When your ears ring, that is a sign that you are damaging your ears and you need to take protective action so it doesn’t happen again. If you don’t, the next time your ears may ring longer (and louder), and eventually they will ring forever—you will be left with permanent loud tinnitus day and night. This is not exactly a fun experience and can quickly take the joy out of your life. So the first step is prevention so you never experience this.

Other factors besides the loud noise included the alcohol you drank. Alcohol alone can cause hearing loss. So can smoking, or being in a smoky environment such as bars often are.

In addition, smoke and noise can have a synergistic effect on your hearing—causing the resulting hearing loss to be even greater if you are around loud noise in a smoky atmosphere at the same time than either of these factors by themselves. The same holds true for carbon monoxide—often found in higher concentrations in smoky environments.

You can read more about these factors in two articles that previously appeared in this eZine back in 2008.

The first one was called “Can Alcohol Cause Tinnitus?” and the second one was entitled, “Alcohol and Hearing Loss“.

I doubt that your hearing loss was all the result of that one loud sound. Certainly the loud noise you have exposed your ears to over the years has taken its toll on your hearing. In addition, there are a number of factors that can cause sudden hearing loss such as a viral infection in your inner ear, a mini-stroke (blood clot in the tiny arteries leading to your inner ears), various diseases, a blow to the head, etc.

Apparently your doctor was thinking mostly that you might have had a mini-stroke—so he gave you medicine to break up blood clots, and dilate (expand) your arteries to try to get more blood to your inner ears in case you might have clogged arteries. At the same time he provided you with good nutrition for your auditory nerves.

Unfortunately, these treatments didn’t improve your hearing much—around 10 dB. This is certainly a step in the right direction, but it still leaves you with a severe hearing loss.

With sudden hearing loss, sometimes your hearing comes back without any treatment (or in spite of any treatment), sometimes it comes back because of treatment, and sometimes it never comes back no matter what treatment you receive. Whether the treatment you received helped you or not, we’ll never know.

This brings me to my two rules of thumb regarding sudden hearing loss.

1. The greater the sudden hearing loss, the less hearing typically comes back. With say a 40 dB loss, you might expect to get 30 dB back, but with an 80 or 90 dB loss, you might only get back 10 or 15 dB, such as in your case.

2. The hearing level you have at the end of 30 days after the sudden hearing loss is likely what you are going to be left with for the rest of your life. In other words, seldom does more hearing come back after 30 days (barring a miracle) unless it has been continuously coming back day by day throughout the initial 30 day period. If this is the case, more hearing may continue to come back. Since your sudden hearing loss happened several months ago, it is very unlikely that any medical treatment now will help restore your hearing. The damage has been done—the hair cells have died—and thus you now have a permanent hearing loss.

At this point, you need to turn your attention from trying to recover more hearing to learning how to successfully live with a hearing loss. This means learning all sorts of coping skills and using amplification (hearing aids and assistive listening devices) to help you hear better. My book, “Keys to Successfully Living with Your Hearing Loss” will certainly help get you well on your way down this new road you are destined to travel.

The other problem you have where certain sounds now sound much too loud and make your tinnitus worse is quite common in people who have lost hearing due to exposing their ears to loud sounds.

A lot of people think of hearing loss as, well—hearing loss. But few realize that along with hearing loss, we often also have either recruitment or hyperacusis, such as you are experiencing, where some normal sounds are now too loud.

Thus, in addition to learning successful hearing loss coping strategies, you also have to learn how to live with this extra racket. Here are a couple of guidelines.

First, you need to protect your ears from loud sounds in the future. Each time you expose your ears to truly loud sounds, you can make your tinnitus worse and your sensitivity to loud sounds even greater. This means avoiding loud venues, or wearing appropriate ear protection—ear plugs or ear muffs.

Second, you must be careful not to overprotect your ears from sounds. Thus only wear ear plugs when it is truly noisy. If you wear them in normal sound situations, you will make this condition worse and worse. The simple rule is to protect your ears when you need to, but never overprotect your ears.

Finally, do not obsess over your ears and this sound sensitivity. The more you worry about it, the worse it will become. Learn how to protect your ears, then learn to ignore these louder sounds as much as you can and let your brain slowly turn down its internal volume. You will probably always be more sensitive to sounds than you were before, but by doing the above you can learn to successfully live with them.