Is your neck and/or your jaw contributing to your tinnitus?
Note: If you are suffering from tinnitus please visit your GP and Audiologist, the investigations and assessments that they will conduct are very important. Osteopathy/ Manual Therapy will only be addressing the musculoskeletal component of tinnitusslec.
Tinnitus (ringing in the ears) affects ~14% of the population in Western societies and for about 10% of people globally, it has become a persistent daily battle (Sabados et al., 2025).
Tinnitus has historically been treated as an isolated ear problem linked to age-related hearing loss or noise exposure (Sabados et al., 2025). As our understanding has evolved, tinnitus is now understood to be a processing issue whereby the auditory cortex (the part of the brain that interprets sound) gets stuck in a phantom feedback loop (Sabados et al., 2025). There is still not a definitive cure for tinnitus, largely because the brain mechanisms maintaining this loop are so complex.
Research has recently been exploring the link between the neck and the jaw as a modulating factor for tinnitus. Manual therapy does not promise to cure tinnitus, but rather presents a conservative treatment option that could significantly help a select subset of tinnitus sufferers.
Changing your tinnitus, the somatosensory connection
Findings from a 2025 study found that two-thirds of people with subjective tinnitus can actively change the volume or pitch of their ringing simply by moving their jaw, shifting their neck or by pressing on specific muscle trigger points (Dipalma et al., 2025).
This is known as somatosensory (or somatic) tinnitus. Somatic tinnitus is typically not simple and also incorporates other systems and structures.
The proposed mechanism behind somatic tinnitus
Within the brainstem there is a sorting station called the dorsal cochlear nucleus. This area is highly unique because it receives dual wiring: it processes acoustic information from your ears and somatosensory (touch, pressure, and position) signals from your neck and jaw. When you have a functional disorder in your neck (like neck stiffness) or a jaw dysfunction (TMD/ TMJ), the nerves send altered, hyperactive signals to this sorting station (Dipalma et al., 2025).
Essentially, mechanical strain in your neck or jaw can act like a volume knob, dialling up the phantom noise.
Tinnitus and the link to chronic pain
Tinnitus is frequently found with those who also suffer from jaw/TMJ pain, headaches, and neck pain (De Meulemeester et al., 2023). Recent studies show a fascinating, yet challenging, overlap between chronic tinnitus and chronic pain. Both conditions share some similarities:
Sensory Hypersensitivity: Chronic pain patients often experience allodynia (pain from things that shouldn't hurt). Similarly, tinnitus patients frequently experience hyperacusis—where everyday sounds feel overwhelmingly loud or even physically painful.
The Emotional Burden: Both conditions are heavily mediated by higher cognitive and emotional areas of the brain. They are fuelled by—and contribute to—anxiety, stress, depression and poor sleep quality.
Central Sensitisation: This is the ultimate crossover. Central sensitisation is a state where the central nervous system becomes trapped in a persistent state of high alert, amplifying neural signalling.
Recent landmark research explored this exact link, comparing patients with chronic tinnitus alone, chronic idiopathic neck pain (CINP) alone and patients suffering from both (De Meulemeester et al., 2023).
The findings revealed that patients with combined tinnitus and neck pain reported significantly higher scores on the Central Sensitisation Inventory (CSI) (De Meulemeester et al., 2023). They also demonstrated local mechanical hyperalgesia—extreme sensitivity to pressure—across the trigeminal (facial) and cervical regions.
Tinnitus is complex and can link to other presentations
When neck pain and tinnitus co-occur, they don't exist in isolation; they actively feed one another, expanding the body's pain maps and lowering pain thresholds. In some presentations Osteopathy/ Manual Therapy can assist with one’s tinnitus presentation.
As initially mentioned, tinnitus is a complex presentation and one should visit their GP and Audiologist to assess the medical and audiological components of their presentation.
References:
De Meulemeester, K., Meeus, M., De Pauw, R., Cagnie, B., Keppler, H., & Lenoir, D. (2023). Suffering from chronic tinnitus, chronic neck pain, or both: Does it impact the presence of signs and symptoms of central sensitization? In PloS one (Vol. 18, Issue 8, p. e0290116). PubMed. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0290116
Dipalma, G., Inchingolo, A. M., Trilli, I., Ferrante, L., Noia, A. Di, de Ruvo, E., Inchingolo, F., Mancini, A., Cocis, S., Palermo, A., & Inchingolo, A. D. (2025). Management of Oro-Antral Communication: A Systemic Review of Diagnostic and Therapeutic Strategies. Diagnostics, 15(2), 194. https://doi.org/10.3390/diagnostics15020194
Sabados, A., Kim, C., Rampp, S., Bergherr, E., Buchfelder, M., Schnell, O., & Müller-Voggel, N. (2025). Reducing Tinnitus via Inhibitory Influence of the Sensorimotor System on Auditory Cortical Activity. In The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience (Vol. 45, Issue 17, p. e0581242025). PubMed. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0581-24.2025