They look like hearing aids, but Jerry Shikora is not hard of hearing at all. His problem is something called tinnitius, "A hushing sound, like a, I guess you'd say like a radiator. The sound that would, the steam coming out of the radiator."

And like most people with tinnitus, says Shikora, "The more you focus on it, or listen to it, the louder it gets. I tried uh, acupuncture, I tried biofeedback, and nothing helped. And I was at my wit's end because it really depressed me. You're hearing this constant hushing sound in your ears 24 hours a day."

Two million Americans are like Jerry, their tinnitus becomes debilitating. It's what finally brought him to the League for the Hard of Hearing.

tI's an intensive, 18-24 month program called Tinnitus Retraining Therapy that starts out with a comprehensive hearing evaluation to rule out any problems there, although tinnitus does not lead to hearing loss.

Ellen LaFargue with the League for the Hard of Hearing says, "Nobody knows the definite cause of tinnitus. It's not anything out here, okay, it's all inside either your ear, or different parts of your brain that are actually generating the sound."

The heart of the therapy is called directive counseling. It's about teaching you to put psychological distance between you and the noise in your ears.

LaFargue says, "We want you to concentrate on something else, yes its there, not a problem. And the idea is at the end of - at the end of the therapeutic process that you will have habituated to the tinnitus meaning, you're not gonna hear it."

And for some patients, there are the devices Jerry used for a while. They're low-level noise generators, to give your brain something other than tinnitus to listen to.

"It saved my life," says Jerry Shikora, "The TRT program did save my life."

That retraining program can be expensive. It costs $2,000 for the first six months of appointments.

The sound generators are $1,300 and insurance doesn't pay for the program.

By Bryce Mursch
http://www.wistv.com/Global/story.asp?S=4961294