Prevent Damage
Living With Hearing Loss
Treatment Options

Prevent Damage

The most preventable cause of hearing loss is noise damage. Here are some steps that you can take to make sure that you are keeping your ears safe and healthy.

• Recognize which noises are harmful
  You need to know how loud is too loud for a noise in order to avoid them. Some good rules of thumb to follow are:

A noise is too loud if…

• …it’s hard to hear others or be heard over the sound.
• …the sound makes your ears ache, hurt or ring.
• …when the sound stops, the remaining noises seem muffled.

• Use hearing protection.
  Earplugs and earmuffs (the construction kind- not the fuzzy winter ones) provide good protection for your ears when you know you are going to be in a noisy situation. Substances like cotton stuffed into your ears do little to protect them.

• Make sure to get some real quiet time
  The damage that noise does can build up over time. A great way to slow this process down is to make sure that every single day you have plenty of silent time. This means no TV or radio, in fact as little background noise as possible.

• Watch the volume
  Be aware of how loud your music, TV, or other entertainment is. If it does not meet the criteria above (recognizing harmful noises) it may be time to turn it down.

• Try to minimize background noise
  If possible, buy the quieter alternatives when you are purchasing appliances. If you can’t do this, try to run major appliances (dishwasher, laundry machines, etc.) when you are out of the house. When purchasing toys and activities, consider the noise level the toy will produce.

Living with Hearing Loss

People who are dealing with hearing loss have many devices today that weren’t previously available. These can help make life easier and more comfortable for those who have trouble hearing.

• Assistive listening devices
  These include telephone amplifiers, personal listening systems, and hearing aids that can be connected directly to devices such as a television, stereo, radio or microphone. They bring the sound directly to your ear and block out background noise.

• Alerting devices
  By using louder sounds, lights or vibrations these devices help people with hearing loss make sure that they will know when the phone or doorbell is ringing, when alarms are going off or even when a baby monitor is picking up important sounds.

• Captions
  Almost all television shows now have closed captions which can appear at the bottom of the screen for those with trouble hearing. Newer TVs will easily display these captions at the touch of a button. Many movie theaters are now providing this service to the hearing impaired as well, though it uses a slightly different means (the captions only appear on special glasses provided to those who need them).

• TTY (text telephone)
  This device allows people to type messages back and forth on the telephone rather than talking/listening. The messages are sent over a normal phone line. There is also a service (TRS) that makes it possible to call a TTY from a regular phone and contact a regular phone from a TTY.

Treatment Options

Depending on what sort of hearing loss a patient is experiencing, there are different methods of treatment. The only way to know which is right for you is to consult your doctor. Many different problems can cause similar symptoms, so it’s important to understand exactly what has happened in your particular case.

Sometimes treatment for hearing loss can be as simple as removing impacted earwax (usually done through a method called “irrigation” which flushes it out with water). Other times, hearing loss may be caused by certain medications that you are taking for other conditions (in which case the hearing should return as soon as you go off the meds) or by an ear infection and will eventually return.

For other types of reversible hearing loss, surgery or medications may be prescribed. For permanent hearing loss (which is usually age-related or noise related), hearing devices might be recommended or long-term methods to maintain your quality of life (such as some of the examples above).