Nationwide Survey Shows How Tinnitus Care in Korean University Hospitals Has Changed Since 2013

A 2025 nationwide survey of otologists at Korean university hospitals finds that tinnitus care has become more structured and more diversified over twelve years, yet barriers such as reimbursement limits and online misinformation persist.

Tinnitus, the perception of ringing, buzzing, or hissing sounds without an external source, affects a substantial share of adults worldwide and is one of the most common reasons people seek help from ear specialists. Because there is no single cure, how clinicians actually manage tinnitus in day-to-day practice matters enormously for the millions of people living with it.

Practice patterns also change over time as new evidence, technologies, and treatment frameworks emerge. A research team in South Korea took advantage of a rare opportunity: a nationwide survey of university hospital otologists conducted in 2013 gave them a baseline against which to measure how tinnitus care has evolved by 2025.

Background: Why the Researchers Looked at This

In 2013, a nationwide survey described how tinnitus was being managed in Korean university hospitals. In the years since, the conceptual understanding of tinnitus has broadened considerably. Clinicians increasingly view it not just as an ear symptom but as a condition shaped by attention, emotion, and psychological wellbeing, which has opened the door to new assessment tools and therapies.

At the same time, entirely new treatment categories have emerged, including digital therapeutics delivered through software, neuromodulation devices that stimulate the nervous system, and expanded forms of auditory rehabilitation. The researchers wanted to know which of these innovations had actually reached routine hospital practice, and where care still falls short.

An otologist, for context, is an ear, nose, and throat physician who specializes in disorders of the ear. University hospital otologists are a useful group to survey because they tend to see the most complex tinnitus cases and often set the tone for practice across the wider healthcare system.

How the Study Was Done

The research team distributed a cross-sectional electronic survey in October 2025 to otologists registered with the Tinnitus Study Group of the Korean Otologic Society. The questionnaire covered how physicians classify tinnitus, which diagnostic tests they order, which treatments they use, how they approach hearing aid fitting for tinnitus patients, and what they see as the biggest barriers to good care.

To compare 2025 answers with the 2013 baseline, the authors mapped survey items between the two questionnaires in advance. They deliberately avoided formal statistical hypothesis testing, because the individual-level responses from 2013 were no longer available and several questions were not directly comparable. The comparison is therefore descriptive, showing broad shifts in practice rather than precise statistical differences.

What the Researchers Found

Thirty-four otologists from 28 of the 45 university hospitals in Korea responded. Compared with 2013, the 2025 respondents reported noticeably broader approaches to classifying tinnitus, greater use of psychological assessment, and wider adoption of structured questionnaires that measure how much tinnitus disrupts a patient's life.

The core treatments, however, remained familiar. Pharmacotherapy, tinnitus retraining therapy, and hearing aid based rehabilitation continued to be the main treatment approaches, just as they were twelve years earlier. Newer options such as cognitive behavioral therapy approaches, digital therapeutics, and neuromodulation appeared more widely in 2025 responses, but the authors found their routine use was still limited.

Auditory rehabilitation itself has expanded in scope. Respondents in 2025 reported using CROS and BiCROS systems, which route sound from a poorer ear to a better ear, as well as cochlear implantation for suitable candidates, options that featured less prominently in the earlier survey.

The barriers physicians named are telling. They cited a lack of definitively effective treatments, online misinformation, unrealistic patient expectations, and reimbursement limitations that constrain what care patients can actually access. The authors also flagged persistent gaps between evidence and practice, including widespread pharmacotherapy despite limited supporting evidence, frequent intratympanic steroid use, inconsistent standards for measuring meaningful improvement, and low adoption of real-ear measurement during hearing aid fitting.

What It Means for People with Hearing Loss

For people living with tinnitus, this survey offers a grounded picture of what specialist care looks like today. It suggests that a thorough tinnitus workup increasingly includes questions about mood, stress, and quality of life alongside hearing tests, and that patients should expect a management plan built from several components rather than a single fix.

The findings also underline how often tinnitus care runs through hearing itself. Hearing aid based rehabilitation remained one of the mainstays of treatment in both 2013 and 2025, reflecting the close link between hearing loss and tinnitus for many patients. At the same time, the reimbursement barriers respondents described are a reminder that cost still shapes who receives care, a challenge that is not unique to Korea.

Hearing Aids Remain Central to Tinnitus Care, and Cost Still Shapes Access

One thread running through this survey is that hearing aid based rehabilitation stayed a mainstay of tinnitus management across twelve years, while reimbursement limits remained a barrier to care. Because cost is a common obstacle to traditional hearing care, newer FDA-OTC hearing aids are designed to lower that barrier for adults with mild-to-moderate hearing loss.

Panda Air is one such device, a modern earbud-style option among self-fitting OTC hearing aids. It uses 16-channel processing with multi-band adaptive noise reduction, works as a Bluetooth OTC hearing aid for calls, TV, and music, and comes with a fast-charge case providing 60 hours of total use, a 5-year warranty, and a 45-day trial that starts when the device arrives. An optional companion app can run an in-ear hearing test through the aid itself and personalize its sound to the user's hearing profile, though Air also works out of the box without the app or the test.

It is important to be clear about what hearing aids do and do not do here. They are not a treatment or cure for tinnitus. For people whose tinnitus accompanies hearing loss, clearer everyday sound may simply make the tinnitus feel less noticeable, which is consistent with why hearing based rehabilitation features so prominently in specialist care. People with severe or profound hearing loss, or tinnitus without hearing loss, are best served by a clinical evaluation.

Limitations of This Research

This is a survey of self-reported practice, not a measurement of patient outcomes, and the 34 respondents from 28 of 45 university hospitals may not represent every specialist's approach. Because individual-level data from the 2013 survey were unavailable and several items were not directly comparable, the authors could not perform formal statistical testing, so the comparison across years is descriptive.

The findings describe Korean university hospital practice specifically, and patterns may differ in community clinics or in other countries. The published abstract does not disclose funding sources or conflicts of interest.

Where This Leaves Us

Twelve years of change have made tinnitus care more structured, more psychological, and more diverse in its rehabilitation options, yet the survey shows the field still lacks definitively effective treatments and standardized outcome measures. For patients, the practical takeaway is to seek care that addresses both hearing and wellbeing, to be wary of online misinformation, and to ask openly about the evidence behind any proposed treatment.

Lee JM, Lee HY, Moon IS. Tinnitus Practice Patterns in Korean University Hospitals: Findings from a 2025 Nationwide Survey and Comparison with 2013. Clinical and Experimental Otorhinolaryngology. 2026. Retrieved from PubMed. https://doi.org/10.21053/ceo.2026-00159