>>11281890It is entirely possible. After you receieve a research grant, no one holds you accountable to do that exact work you outlined. You can research anything you want, but hopefully it yields papers or else when that money runs out you aren't getting any more. It's difficult to break into a field that is not well-studied because either you're an early researcher who needs funding badly and is going to study something safe that will likely yield publishable results, or you're a late researcher who already has an established base of knowledge to work off of and the comfortable thing to do is keep going in that direction. Diversification is risk. That doesn't mean no one is doing it, it just means it's an aggressively selective process that severely reduces the pool of researchers willing to work in unknown areas, and I am 100% confident in saying it's a lot easier to do a double blind on rats with neuropathy using opioids than it is to try and propose some kind of vague tissue engineering.
If you want to find real research, your best bet is to find the people working on tinnitus at all, comb the introduction paragraph references to see if they cite anyone doing the kind of work you're interetsted in. Any disucssion of tinnitus treatment should begin with the types of treatments that have been or are being currently reported in literature.
