Over the past few years I have taken care of hundreds of patients with pulsatile tinnitus. Many of them had serious, and potentially life-threatening, conditions (such as dural arteriovenous fistulas), and others had more benign problems, like a venous aneurysm or venous sinus stenosis. Some patients were suffering from catastrophic pulsatile tinnitus, while others could tolerate its symptoms.
What many of those patients have in common, though, is that almost every one of them was told at some point that there was nothing to be done to treat pulsatile tinnitus. They were advised to learn to “live with it.” That’s terrible advice, reflecting the lack of proper education many physicians have received on this topic.