Your Hearing Health is Fundamental to Your Overall Quality of Life
It is impossible to get an exact cunt, but experts estimate somewhere between 35 & 45 million Americans live with a detectable degree of hearing loss. That is more people than diabetes or cancer, somewhere around 14% of the total population aged 18 & above. It affects a greater & greater percentage of the population as the demographic ages until over half of everyone aged 75 & older has hearing loss. Sadly, less than 20% of everyone that has hearing loss seeks & keeps up with meaningful treatment.
What many people fail to grasp is that hearing health, similar to a healthy diet, exercise, & sufficient rest, is an essential component of your overall health, impacting every dimension of your personal health & life. Left untreated, hearing loss often leads to much more than just the obvious risks that come with a decreased awareness of one’s environment. Hearing loss damages someone’s emotional & psychological health as well. Relationships & career goals often cannot escape unscathed.
How It Happens
It may be surprising that more than 80% of everyone who suffers from a disability would downplay its severity. But it makes more sense when you consider that hearing loss most often comes on so gradually over a number of years that it is actually impossible for someone to recognize that it is happening to them.
The vast majority of the time hearing loss is the result of the same injury. Sound waves cause the many tiny hairs in your inner ear to vibrate against your ear drum. Your ear drum then sends a signals to your brain seemingly instantaneously to decipher. When these hairs are damaged or die, they do not come back. Injury to them is permanent & irreversible. And that is how hearing loss slowly comes on. There are of course exceptional circumstances in which sudden injuries such as loud blasts cause hearing loss, but most often it is habitual exposure to dangerous sound levels that kill the tiny hairs & nerves.
Many recreational habits like concerts & sports events are a risk. But The Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates 22 million workers are exposed annually to dangerous volumes at work. Wild nightlife, a tarmac, and operating a jackhammer at a construction site all have this in common.
You know that you are in a potentially dangerously loud environment when you are required to raise your voice to communicate with someone three feet away from you. That means it is most likely louder than 85 dB and that is a potentially dangerous volume for extended exposure. Temporary hearing loss or ringing in your ears after exposure means you are at risk.
Ototoxic chemicals are another threat to your central auditory system that most often happens at your workplace. These chemicals cause hearing loss and balance problems when inhaled, ingested, or absorbed through your skin. The combination of noise and ototoxic chemicals leads to a synergistic damage. Even if the sound levels remain below industry standards of acceptable risk and the chemical exposures are also within acceptable standards, they can still be harmful when your are exposed to both. This makes certain industries like agriculture, construction, manufacturing, & mining particularly risky.
The Missed Opportunities
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guarantees that those with disabilities are protected from discrimination in every aspect of public life. However, considering so many people fail to recognize when hearing loss is coming on or downplay it if they do, it is easy to see how the protections that ADA provides for them may be overlooked.
The most obvious risk is physical safety. We depend on our hearing to situate ourselves in our environment & it is closely related to our sense of balance. So it is not just failing to hear alarms in emergencies or horns coming up behind you. Hearing loss also creates confusion. Especially when someone has not yet accepted what is happening to them, they find themselves suddenly having trouble keeping up with instructions or following conversations. They may not even notice that this is the case because through the quick & subtle use of context clues they fill in dropped words & keep up best they can. But that extra concentration causes fatigue.
Can you really imagine any situation in any workplace, blue collar or white collar, in which you are working harder than your coworkers to keep up & you are somehow not at a disadvantage? The accruing consequences are obvious. The opportunities we are able to create for ourselves each day compound into opportunities for advancement.
Whether you suspect you are suffering from hearing loss or not, due diligence to its upkeep will go a tremendous way in protecting your overall quality of life. Make an appointment today with one of our specialists.