Full Story, Part 2: The High-Risk Experiment

Anyone who has read my story this far might think: “Okay, he beat tinnitus the first time. Happy ending.” But the truth is, the worst was still ahead of me. The real, life-threatening collapse of my body was still waiting for me.

The Disastrous Chain Reaction: The CFS Crash

One thing first: this collapse was not the price of healing my tinnitus. The tinnitus was not the cause. It was a separate chain reaction involving several factors that came together:

• The underlying trauma: I was still carrying deep, unresolved psychological trauma inside me (triggered by an extreme drug-induced bad trip in late 2010). I had deliberately left this detail out of the first part of my story because that part was primarily about the physical damage to my ear, and I didn’t want to distract from the main subject. But it was now a gigantic factor in this total system crash because it kept my nervous system under constant background stress.
• The aftereffects of cortisone: The powerful infusions administered by doctors had chemically put my body into an artificial state of constant wakefulness.
• The energy paradox, my sleep schedule, and the supplement trap: At this point, an attentive reader might reasonably ask: “Wait a minute… If he was heading straight toward severe CFS, how could he sometimes stay up all night, remain active for extremely long periods, and still have enough strength to heal his tinnitus at the same time? That makes absolutely no sense!” The answer: at that point, I didn’t yet have full-blown CFS (that came much later as a result of the EBV infection, when the tinnitus was already healed). Quite the opposite: in physical terms, my body’s cells actually had a great deal of energy relative to how much they were using! In the evenings, I was extremely wired, couldn’t settle down, and my entire sleep schedule shifted dramatically later. I kept myself revved up with an excessive lifestyle fueled by sugar and caffeine, while continuing to take the very same stimulating supplements that had helped me with my first tinnitus episode. This combination catapulted me into absolute “overdrive.” And yes, my body used precisely this abundance of energy (together with my strict protection of my ears from noise) to gradually and successfully heal the tinnitus! But the price was high: I had palpable energy during this phase, but I kept running down my reserves week after week—too little sleep, constantly wired, with sugar and caffeine on top.
• Chemically wiping out my gut flora (antibiotics and acid blockers): Adding to all this stress on my nervous system and body was another massive physical factor. Because I tested positive for Helicobacter pylori, I had to undergo an aggressive triple-antibiotic regimen and then take powerful acid blockers (used as stomach protection) for a full 3 months. That was the death blow to my gut flora—and with it, to a large part of my immune system.

And at that exact moment, with my immune system completely out of reserves, it happened: I contracted the Epstein-Barr virus (infectious mononucleosis) from my cousin. Because I’d never had this severe infection before and my system had absolutely no reserves left, it was the final blow. Within a few weeks, I developed full-blown chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS).

The €6,800 Dead End and My Greatest Act of Arrogance

That period of CFS was the worst time of my life. Its most extreme phase persisted nonstop for between 11 and 13 months. I was almost completely bedridden and trapped in my house. My body felt as though it were burning from the inside, my brain was buried under a dense fog, and my muscles had lost all their strength. My mitochondria (the powerhouses of the cell) had almost completely stopped producing ATP (cellular energy).

In my desperation, I tried everything the market had to offer. I researched like a madman and indiscriminately bought anything that promised even the faintest glimmer of hope. It wasn’t just supplements from supposedly “scientific” American heavyweights such as Life Extension or Thorne. The list was endless: I bought piles of over-the-counter medications, countless homeopathic remedies, natural products such as Schüßler salts, expensive detoxification procedures and products intended to remove toxins—and even hormone replacement products meant to rebuild my supposedly completely exhausted adrenal glands.

Then there were all the different therapists and treatments. I received expensive vitamin C infusions in the hope of reactivating my immune system. I went to a particular therapist (trained in Dr. Klinghardt’s method). There, they tried to treat me with high-dose vitamin D, antifungal medication, and treatment for a rare metabolic disorder called KPU (kryptopyrroluria) that I supposedly had. (Just an important clarification so no one gets the wrong impression here: this visit was purely about my CFS, meaning the extreme exhaustion—my tinnitus was already completely healed by that point. It wasn’t a heavy-metal detox either; it was more about the KPU issue and vitamins. Her approach was by no means wrong; at the time, it simply wasn’t the right key for my completely blocked system.) To this day, I don’t know whether I ever really had KPU. In any case, it did absolutely nothing for my condition at the time.

I even wanted to undergo simulated altitude training (so-called hypoxia therapy / IHHT) at a practice, alternating between oxygen-poor and oxygen-rich air to put the mitochondria under artificial stress and force them to restart. I actually went there, but abandoned the plan on the spot because I simply became too panicked and my shattered system recoiled from it.

In the end, I was so desperate that I wanted to be admitted to a specialist clinic as an inpatient. I had already scheduled my admission. I ultimately canceled only because I had managed to free myself from this hell shortly before the admission date.

During that one year, I burned through around €6,800—no exaggeration—on products, devices, and therapies for this whole insanity. The result? Absolutely zero. Nothing worked. My body didn’t respond to any of it. I felt as though I had been buried alive.

And then this:

During my intense nights of research in the CFS swamp, I actually came across the website of a German company called FitLine. I can still see it clearly in my mind: I landed on the site and stayed for exactly 4 or 5 seconds. Then I read the name “FitLine,” saw the way the site looked, and arrogantly thought: “What kind of stupid name is that for some trendy sports drink? I need heavy-duty medicine, not colorful juices.”

In my mind, I immediately put it in the same category as Ratiopharm or Centrum—nothing but low-quality, mass-market products in my eyes at the time. I closed the tab. I completely overlooked the fact that this company offered an absolute, unconditional, 100% money-back guarantee. My ego and my half-baked knowledge got in my way.

Today, I’m annoyed with myself about those five seconds of arrogance—they probably cost me many more months in CFS hell. On the other hand, I’m glad I didn’t start an uninformed self-experiment back then: without my alternative health practitioner’s precise instructions, I’d probably have used the products incorrectly in the condition I was in at the time.

2013: The Niacin Flush and the Cellular Restart

At my absolute lowest point in 2013, when I truly didn’t know what else to do and was bedridden 98% of the time, something crucial happened. I was lying in bed with my laptop in front of me. Because of my own history, I’d spent a lot of time searching for information about tinnitus, and the YouTube algorithm suddenly served up a video in my feed. It was a lecture on tinnitus by an alternative health practitioner I already knew from YouTube. I’d watched a few of his videos before, and they’d impressed me enormously because he explained things in an incredibly holistic, easy-to-follow way and with an exceptionally high level of expertise.

Since I was constantly and desperately searching for new doctors and alternative health practitioners anyway, an impulse came over me out of nowhere: “I’m going to listen to him again. Let’s see whether he can convince me—whether he’s the next person I’ll try.” I clicked on the video, closed my eyes out of sheer exhaustion, and simply listened.

There’s one important thing to know here: by this point, my mother was already flatly refusing to drive me to any more doctors or alternative health practitioners. We’d simply burned through such an unbelievable amount of money in such a short period (the €6,800 I mentioned) that her refusal was, of course, completely understandable.

But as I listened to him and once again found myself completely captivated by his manner, I looked more closely and made a discovery that absolutely floored me: the guy was only 30 kilometers away from me! I’d had absolutely no idea until then. In that moment, a burning resolve took hold of me: “I have to give him a try. This is my very last attempt before I finally have myself admitted to the clinic.” Fortunately, because he was so close, I dragged myself to his practice shortly afterward with the last of my strength.

He listened to my story, stood up, and mixed a powder into a glass of water for me. He placed a glass of bright orange, almost carrot-colored liquid in front of me. I drank it.

And then it clicked—though only afterward: what he’d given me there was exactly the complete FitLine set (consisting of Basics, Restorate, Activize, high-dose DHA/EPA omega-3s, and Q10)—the very same “trendy juices” I’d clicked away from with such unbelievable arrogance some time earlier!

What happened at his practice after I drank it was absolutely insane: after 6 to 8 minutes, I suddenly felt my entire body become extremely warm. I felt a tremendous rush of blood course through my veins. My skin turned red, and I felt tingling all over. For the very first time in more than a year, I felt real, physical energy in my cells again. The Activize in the set had triggered a massive niacin flush in me.

To put this into context right away and avoid frightening anyone with this tingling: the flush was so extremely intense in my case only because my body was completely burned out at the cellular level. And that was not because I had not consumed any nutrients—I had already swallowed nearly €6,800 worth of American pills!

The real problem for me was a threefold barrier in my system. First, my gastrointestinal tract had been thrown completely out of balance by the constant stress, inflammation, and previous courses of antibiotics (which had led to dysbiosis). Second, because of CFS, my gut simply lacked the cellular energy (ATP) to perform the hard work of digestion and nutrient absorption in the first place. And third, my cells had become so acidic from running on anaerobic emergency power that even the nutrients that still made it into my bloodstream could barely enter the target cells. I was starving at the cellular level despite full plates.

It was this highly bioavailable liquid nutrient set that broke through the barrier. In that moment, hope flared up again. Shortly afterward, I finally put my pride aside, got the complete set to use at home, and from then on took it consistently every day. The results were almost surreal:

• After 20 days: I was fit enough to climb stairs normally again.
• After 2 months: I was no longer bedridden at all. I could get on my bike and ride hard and fast out in nature for an hour without being wiped out for days afterward (“post-exertional malaise”).
• After 3 to 4 months: I took my first real steps back into everyday life and attended a school for a computer course. I completed that course with total confidence, without my body crashing again afterward. Physically, CFS really was history for me—for good.
• After almost 2 years: Once my circulatory system had completely readjusted to physical exertion and I’d also regained psychological stability through targeted trauma work, I returned to the hard grind of working life. I started working for Rewe online. This was no desk job. It was intense physical work—a backbreaking job that included carrying heavy cases of drinks up to the fifth floor. And my body didn’t just withstand it: I was physically so extremely fit again that I often even ended up voluntarily working double shifts.

I wasn’t only physically back to 100%—in terms of energy, I was even more robust and capable than ever before in my entire life!

Why Am I Sharing All This? (The Bridge to My Second Tinnitus Episode)

Because without CFS, the second part of this story would never have happened. During that time, I came to understand what cellular energy is and what bioavailability means—through my own body, from being bedridden 98% of the time to volunteering for double shifts.

And I now had a nutrient set in my hands—and I knew what it could do. That knowledge gave me the craziest idea of my life.

The Decision to Run the Stress Test (The Experiment)

The years passed. By then, I was living a completely normal life again, my hearing was perfect, and my daily nutrient routine made me feel more energized than ever before. I often thought back to my tinnitus theory.

I couldn’t let go of the logic behind it: by that point, I felt like I had three times as much energy as I had when I first had tinnitus. That was why, back then, I’d had to shut myself away in a quiet room for half a year: with so little energy, the cells in my ears were simply too weak. Every ordinary sound in daily life had probably had a much greater negative impact on my recovery from tinnitus then than it would if I went through the same thing now. That was my exact thought process at the time.

So I did what must sound absolutely insane to any doctor: I deliberately provoked tinnitus a second time.

The Deliberate Provocation

Several years after recovering from CFS, two things came together. On the one hand, I still had an enormous hunger for life. On the other hand, my tinnitus theory was firmly lodged in my mind, and I had to know. So at a party that was already very loud, I completely cast aside the caution that had protected me before. I partied especially hard and deliberately soaked up the full force of the noise.

Even during the party, I started paying the price at times: whenever it got especially loud, I suddenly felt a distinct pressure in my ears. It was nowhere near as intense as it had been after that first night at the club, but I could clearly tell that the noise was really taking a toll on my ears in those moments. As soon as things grew a little quieter again, the pressure would fade after a short while. It was only a temporary warning signal and—this was the crucial part—there was no tinnitus yet.

That exact feeling of pressure was the final push that flipped a switch in my head. I thought: “Okay, the system is faltering. If I’m going through with this experiment, I’m going to push it to the absolute limit now—until the tinnitus comes back.”

When Music Becomes Physical Agony

What followed were weeks of excessive headphone sessions with very loud music. During this phase, the way I experienced sound changed drastically. At times, the music stopped being enjoyable altogether. Listening became sheer effort and felt like genuine physical pain—an extremely unpleasant, diffuse pressure deep inside my ear.

Everything in me screamed: Take those headphones off, this is way too much for your ears! I ignored it and stubbornly kept going.

Even away from the computer, daily life continued at maximum volume. It never even crossed my mind to shut myself away in my room as I had the first time. I drove long distances with loud music playing, went to birthday parties with friends, went out partying, and soaked up the full, merciless volume of life.

The Return of the Tone

And eventually, that evening came. I was sitting at my computer again, listening through my headphones—and suddenly, I could faintly but unmistakably hear it in my left ear again. The tone was back. It was still very quiet, and I could easily drown it out with the sounds around me, but it was there.

At that moment, an extreme, absurd conflict raged inside me. On the one hand, sheer horror shot through me: “Oh shit!” On the other hand, there was this almost delusional fascination: “Okay, wow. I did it. This is exactly what I needed for the test.”

Deliberately Stopping the Supplements: Letting the Tinnitus Grow

But how did the tinnitus manage to climb back to such a brutal level—about 75% as loud as it had been the very first time I had tinnitus—under these circumstances? After all, through my FitLine protocol, I’d built up a massive shield! The answer: I deliberately dismantled that shield.

When the tinnitus in my left ear was initially only very faint and diffuse again, I could tell that my fully charged system was fighting back immediately. The nutrients kept the damage extremely limited. But that was exactly what I didn’t want for my ultimate experiment. If I wanted to prove that my protocol could repair severe tinnitus “on the go” (in everyday life), the tinnitus first had to grow back to a substantial, undeniable level.

So I made an insane but deliberate decision: I took a complete break from my nutrient supplements (abstinence). I stopped taking my entire FitLine set. And the lecithin—which I’d already known and used as my absolute foundation for the myelin sheath during my first tinnitus episode (Full Story, Part 1)—I stopped taking that completely too.

In the middle of the noise experiment, I deliberately deprived the cell of its most important synergistic factors and building blocks. I wanted to let the tinnitus grow on purpose, so the products wouldn’t suppress it before it even reached the level I wanted for my test. A stress test without a safety net.

The Final Collapse: About 75 Percent and the Chaos of Sound

It took an estimated month and a half—two months at most—for my system to finally collapse under this extreme, sustained provocation and the absence of its biochemical shield.

One evening, that point had been reached. The tinnitus was no longer quiet. It had come back with brutal force. In my left ear, it was about three-quarters as loud (75%) as it had been the very first time I had tinnitus. My right ear had made itself heard again too, but it remained relatively weak and was easy to drown out with background noise. The tinnitus in my left ear, on the other hand, was extremely intrusive.

And the soundscape was completely insane and new. My head was picking up absolute chaos—a jumble of electrical misfires:

• The typical, intrusive sine-wave beeping (that was the main sound).
• On top of that, I suddenly heard a bizarre Morse-code-like signal. It was completely new to me, and I was almost fascinated that something like that was even possible.
• Then there was a low, eerie hiss in my left ear that I had never heard before.
• And on top of that, there was a siren sound that grew louder and softer, was extremely intense for two weeks, and then receded into the background.

Real-Time Experiments on My Own Ear

Before I finally started working on healing after this escalation, there were a few things I absolutely wanted to test while the tinnitus was this loud. By then, I knew how tinnitus worked, and I wanted to subject the system in my own body to a physical stress test. I literally tested the system at the limit of what it could take:

1. The Jaw-Neck Test (The Cross-Wiring):
I wanted to see whether my tinnitus would once again respond to my neck and jaw. So I made sweeping movements with my head, tensed my neck, and contorted my jaw. The result was unmistakable: I could definitely influence both the character and the volume of the sound!

2. The Noise Test (Proof Against Masking):
I put on my headphones and played extremely loud white noise for two to three minutes. Then I ripped the headphones off. The result was fascinating and cruel at the same time: for a few seconds, the tinnitus was completely gone. There was absolute dead silence. But immediately afterward, it howled back, louder and more aggressive than ever before.

(For me, this was proof from my own body: doctors recommend white noise for masking. What, in my eyes, was really happening? The loud noise forced my already sick hair cells to pump ions nonstop. When I pulled off the headphones, the cell’s battery was completely drained. For a few seconds, it was physically shut down and “mute.” As soon as it recharged even a tiny bit of energy, the emergency signal slammed back twice as loud!)

3. The Clap Test (The Mechanical Shock):
It may sound stupid, but I clapped my hands hard once directly in front of my ear. It created a small pressure wave. The result: at the exact moment of the clap, the tinnitus howled angrily. But it settled back to its normal level relatively quickly.

Raw Panic in the Night

But when I lay in bed that evening, reality hit me brutally hard. The noises in my head were so deafening and intrusive that—especially in my left ear—I couldn’t even drown them out with the TV. That made it extremely difficult to fall asleep and strongly reminded me of the first time I had tinnitus.

That made me really, truly scared. In an instant, my initial euphoria about the successful experiment and my fascination with it were completely gone.

I stared at the ceiling, my thoughts racing: “My God, I really hope this goes away again. Did I do something completely wrong? Was this a massive mistake? Am I going to have this for the rest of my life now, just because I wanted to prove something with a stupid experiment?”

Hell was back.

The Minimal Arsenal and the Postponed “Monk Mode”

The next morning, I got up with my mind made up. The tinnitus was loud enough. Time to fight back and start taking the products again. When my newly ordered FitLine package arrived, I also headed out and picked up my tried-and-true lecithin from the drugstore so I could begin my comeback and start healing.

So my healing stack looked like this:

• The complete FitLine set (Activize, Restorate, Basics, and omega-3 with Q10).
• Lecithin granules.

(Why no bitter amino acid powder this time, unlike the first time? Back then, I had chronic gastritis and could barely make use of proteins from normal food. Now, after my gut health had been restored, my digestion was working properly—my body got its amino acids from food.)

From then on, I took the products every single day, but there was one massive “problem”: I was ravenous for life. My victory over CFS was already several years behind me. I was working again, I was fully engaged in life, and I was back in the swing of things. So I thought: “I’ll take this stack for now to blunt the worst of it. But how exactly I’m going to handle this extreme ‘monk mode’ again… I’ll figure that out later.” I simply had absolutely no desire to cut myself off completely from my friends, my job, and life the way I had the first time. For the time being, I just kept putting off that hard decision.

Intelligent Noise Management Instead of Total Isolation

So I chose a compromise: I tried to keep noise levels as low as possible throughout the day and consistently avoid extreme noise spikes. In concrete terms, that meant no more blasting the car stereo, no more loud headphone sessions at home, and obviously staying away from nightclubs.

But apart from that, I didn’t withdraw completely. I continued to go shopping as usual. I went to the fair with friends and to the movies with coworkers. I kept living a relatively normal life. And whenever a spontaneous opportunity to have fun came up and I didn’t want to say “no” because of the noise—like going to a regular party with friends (not a loud nightclub, just a regular party)—I said yes and went.

The “Huh?!” Moment in Week 2

And then something incredible happened—something I had absolutely not expected. Within just the first few weeks—I estimate it was somewhere between week 2 and week 3—I suddenly realized: Man, the tone is already responding!

The noises had noticeably diminished and thinned out, and the frequencies began to shift. First, that completely new hissing sound in my left ear disappeared. Then the constant whistling tone and the rest of the soundscape noticeably thinned out as well. The tones were nowhere near as aggressive as they had been just weeks earlier. I noticed it especially in the mornings.

I sat there staring ahead, completely taken aback, and thought: “Huh?! Okay, wow… I’m basically still living a completely normal life here, only avoiding the intense, sustained noise spikes, and this whole thing is already responding?!” I still had a plan in the back of my mind: for complete, final healing, I might soon have to switch to that strict monk mode after all. But because my system was already responding so incredibly well to the nutrients, I simply continued with this compromise for the time being.

The Frequencies Dying Out and Absolute Silence

The healing process unfolded gradually over roughly three to four months. But the tinnitus didn’t disappear all at once. Instead, its frequencies switched off systematically:

• The tinnitus in my right ear was the first to go quiet. After about two months, that ear was already completely healed and fell completely silent again.
• In my left ear (the one with the severe damage), the crazy frequencies switched off one after another. (The hissing had already disappeared right at the beginning.) Then the siren sound that grew louder and softer faded. The deep truck-like rumble that had appeared as a new sound also faded relatively quickly.
• The only thing that remained extremely stubborn was the classic, high-frequency sine-wave tone. The absolute final boss.

Just as with my first tinnitus episode, the mornings were the crucial indicator. That was when I noticed the strongest effects of regeneration. It seemed as though a dial were moving farther and farther toward the zero line—toward “no more tinnitus.” As the weeks passed, the change became more dramatic: eventually, the tone in the morning wasn’t just quieter—I could no longer hear it at all in my normal surroundings. By then, I could detect it only when I deliberately listened for it with earplugs in absolute silence (just as I had experienced and described during the healing of my first tinnitus), before the day’s fatigue made the whistling grow louder again.

Toward the end of the third month, the tone had become so quiet in the evening that I could only hear it while wearing earplugs in a completely silent room or sitting in an absolutely quiet bathroom. The tinnitus in my right ear was already completely gone by then. Only in my left ear was the tone still faintly present.

To finish the job once and for all, I got some special vitamin B12 drops again and put them directly under my tongue every day to give my system one very last kick through the lining of my mouth.

And then, at some point during the weeks that followed, it was completely gone. Today, I can no longer say exactly how many weeks it took from that point because eventually, I simply stopped paying such close attention to it. But at some point, it was just gone. It disappeared. Without a trace. 100%.

Why You’re Reading This

I had passed the craziest test of my life. And now I knew: the first time, a lot had come down to chance and luck. Not the second time. The tinnitus went away because I gave my cells what they needed—right in the middle of normal everyday life, without monk mode.

I’d never planned to create a website. I’d done all of this for myself, to find peace—and perhaps to tell a buddy or my alternative health practitioner about it one day.

But the more I read about how many people are sent home by doctors with the word “incurable” and are at their wits’ end at night, the clearer it became: I’m not keeping this to myself.

A Short, Honest Word in Closing (Real Talk)

I know exactly how this entire story of illness and healing must read to an outsider. If I hadn’t experienced all of it firsthand—the cascade of absurd “coincidences,” my initial rebellion against the ENT doctor, the plunge into CFS, the €6,800 worth of failed treatments, and finally that crazy moment when, in my darkest hour, the YouTube algorithm brought the alternative health practitioner who would save me—just 30 kilometers away—onto my screen… I’d probably dismiss it myself as a cheap Hollywood script or a made-up fairy tale. It simply sounds too crazy to be true.

But that’s exactly why I’m laying all my cards out on the table here. This isn’t a made-up healing story; it isn’t a marketing gimmick, and it certainly isn’t baseless esoteric speculation. This is the cold, hard truth of physics and cell biology. I have every single piece of physical evidence of this hell and this healing: my medical audiograms with their massive dips at particular frequencies, the lab reports, the diagnoses, and the invoices from clinics and therapists.

I’m not telling you all of this to entertain you. I’m telling you because I found a way out of this system for myself—and because I hope this knowledge can help you with your hearing and help you through the nights too.

← Full Story, Part 1: The Ride Through Hell