[quote author="thermionic"][quote author="JohnRoberts"]
While I wouldn't really call it tinnitus I had audible blood pulsing in one ear for something like one night. As I recall it was gone by morning. It was not a chronic condition but the consequence of a sports injury I didn't manage properly (broken blood vessel in one biceps and traveling blood clots).
To thin my blood, aspirin worked for me.
JR[/quote]
Am I right to assume that the sports injury was a pretty painful one, John? If so, your ESR / Sedimentary Rate may well have been elevated, which is a common cause of temporary pulsatile tinnitus. The aspirin would have helped control the inflammation, bringing your ESR down, in turn creating greater blood flow through the capillaries within your ear - and voila, adios tinnitus! The blood thinning property would also have helped flush out the capillaries.
It should be noted that a high proportion of steady-tone tinnitus cases are deemed to be idiopathic or noise trauma-induced, whereas pulsatile tinnitus is more often a sign of another condition such as inflammation or infection. PT can be idiopathic though, so don't automatically assume it's a sign of something else. Dehydration could probably cause PT by thickening the blood.
Justin[/quote]
I suspect this is TMI but since you seem interested, the sports injury was not that painful. While playing basketball the bigger guy I was trying to guard under the basket swung his arms wildly and caught me square in my left bicep with his elbow.. he broke a blood vessel in the middle of that muscle. Injuries like that are generally not serious and knit up OK, but I compounded the injury when I foolishly ran 5 miles the next day... I was about 3 miles from my house when I noticed I was pumping blood into my left forearm. Too far to walk home I finished my run..
The hard part was getting all that blood out of where it wasn't supposed to be and back into my veins. My biggest difficulty was clearing clotted blood from the small blood vessels in my hand/fingers. I actually still have some minor nerve damage (tingling in my pinky) years later, from lack of blood flow before I finally cleared all the clots and got blood flowing freely again. In a Rube Goldberg DIY remedy worthy of mention here. I dosed up with garlic and aspirin (and beer) and wrapped my hand in a blood pressure cuff. Then I pressurized my hand to 160# to help break up the clots... Silly sounding but it worked after numerous repetitions.
The noise in my ear a day or two later was a trivial distraction compared to actual nerve damage. In hindsight the traveling clots could have done far worse mischief elsewhere, but I guess they had to pass through the fine blood vessels in my hand so only smaller blood vessels elsewhere would notice them. I was stupid and lucky.
I still play basketball but am more sensitive now to letting my body mend a little longer after insults.
JR