"I'm very discouraged," Steinman said last week. "It just isn't going well. It's worse than it was before."

Steinman, whose tinnitus had grown progressively worse since it first hit 15 years ago, signed up for an experimental trial through the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Doctors there implanted an electrode near her right ear and made an incision near her collarbone large enough to implant a battery pack and magnet, connected by wires to her ear.

When she got the procedure in December, she became the second person in the world to be treated for severe tinnitus with a brain-stimulation device that usually is used to treat Parkinson's disease and other brain disorders.

The aim was to interrupt the signals in the brain and make the noise go away.

"They make a setting and it seems to work for about two days," Steinman said.

"The doctor keeps telling me not to give up, that there are thousands of settings he can put this on," she said. "But none of them are holding for me. I've not been very happy."

Steinman's story has attracted a lot of interest from readers who also suffer from tinnitus. In December, she said she was undergoing the procedure, "not just for me but so other people can get some help, too."

Now, she thinks the experiment isn't working for her because she has lived with tinnitus for so long.

"Maybe it will help someone who hasn't had it as long as me, whose brain hasn't been hearing the ringing for so long.

"I feel like I'm failing the study, but the doctors say, 'No, even though it might not work for you, it gives us information for the next person.' "

Some 50 million Americans have some degree of tinnitus and 1 million to 2 million have it so severely that it interrupts daily living, according to the American Tinnitus Association.

For more information about tinnitus, go to the American Tinnitus Association Web site at www.ata.org.

By Bill Scanlon, Rocky Mountain News
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_4462506,00.html