This efficacy of this treatment just seems wildly improbable to me. You zap a person’s tongue and then play a bunch of random frequencies in their ears and it cures tinnitus? Why? What’s the mechanism? Can someone who understands neurology explain how this works?
I mean some of the reasoning in the article is so hand-wavy. Like, saying that stimulating the tongue stimulates the brain. No shit, stimulating any nerve stimulates the part of the brain that feels touch in that nerve. I don’t buy it.
There are a lot of things that cannot be explained in neurology like why salt on the tongue eases the pain of pepper in your eyes or how some people sleep with their eyes open. There are a lot of what I like to call 'cross-connections' in our biology that defy logic as we know it. These I suspect, are the foundation for acupuncture (not that I espouse it).
There is a well accepted theory that tinnitus is a kind of pathological rewiring of the circuits in the brain that give rise to the sensation of sound. Whether this is compensatory for hearing loss (i.e., higher noise that your brain accepts in order to get more signal) or purely pathological is an open question, but it does sound reasonable that electric stimulation applied concurrently with sound stimulus could rectify some of the issue. I don't know how they'd determine which tones or regions to stimulate though.
We know very little about how the human nervous system actually works. Virtually all psychiatric illnesses and treatments lack any known mechanism- yet that doesn't prevent us from discovering effective treatments.
I mean some of the reasoning in the article is so hand-wavy. Like, saying that stimulating the tongue stimulates the brain. No shit, stimulating any nerve stimulates the part of the brain that feels touch in that nerve. I don’t buy it.