How Your Body Rebounds From Injury and Sickness
The physical body can generally heal scrapes, cuts, and broken bones, though some injuries take longer than others.
Unfortunately, there is no fix for the delicate hair cells in your ears once they become damaged.
At least so far.
Animals can repair damage to the hair cells in their ears and get their hearing back, but humans don’t possess that ability (although scientists are working on it).
That means you may have a permanent loss of hearing if you damage the hearing nerve or those little hairs.
At What Point Does Hearing Loss Become Irreversible?
Upon identifying hearing loss, the initial concern that usually emerges is whether the hearing will be recovered.
Whether it will or not depends on a variety of factors.
Two primary types of hearing loss:
- Obstruction-based loss of hearing: When there’s something obstructing your ear canal, you can experience all of the symptoms of hearing loss.
Debris, earwax, and tumors are a few of the things that can cause an obstruction.
Your hearing normally returns to normal after the blockage is eliminated, and that’s the good news. - Hearing loss caused by damage: But there’s another, more prevalent kind of hearing loss that represents around 90 percent of hearing loss.
Clinically known as sensorineural hearing loss, this kind of hearing loss is typically permanent.
Here’s the way it works: tiny hairs in your ear move when hit with moving air (sound waves).
Your brain transforms these vibrations into auditory signals that are heard by you as sound.
But your hearing can, over time, be permanently harmed by loud noises.
Sensorineural hearing loss can also be triggered by damage to the inner ear or nerve.
A cochlear implant can help restore hearing in some instances of hearing loss, particularly in extreme cases.
A hearing exam will help you determine whether hearing aids will help improve your hearing.
Solutions for Improving Your Hearing
There is presently no cure for sensorineural hearing loss.
But it may be possible to obtain effective treatment.
The following are a few ways that obtaining the right treatment can help you:
- Make sure your general quality of life is unaltered or remains high.
- Successfully manage any of the symptoms of hearing loss you may be experiencing.
- Preserve and protect the hearing you still have.
- Keep solitude away by staying socially active.
- Prevent mental degeneration.
This treatment can take many forms, and it’ll usually be dependent on how extreme your hearing loss is.
A frequently recommended and rather straightforward strategy is the use of hearing aids.
How is Hearing Loss Managed by Hearing Aids
Individuals going through hearing loss can make use of hearing aids to detect sounds which will allow them to function more effectively.
Fatigue occurs when the brain needs to work harder to process sound.
As researchers develop more insights, they have recognized a greater danger of mental decline with a persistent lack of cognitive input.
Hearing aids help you recover your mental function by allowing your ears to hear once more.
In fact, utilizing hearing aids has been shown to slow down mental decline by as much as 75%.
Modern hearing aids will also allow you to focus on what you want to hear while tuning out background sounds.
Prevention is The Best Protection
If you take away one thing from this little lesson, hopefully, it’s this: you need to protect the hearing you have because you can’t count on recuperating from hearing loss. If an object becomes wedged in your ear canal, it can usually be safely removed.
However, this doesn’t reduce the danger posed by loud noises, which can be harmful even if they don’t seem excessively loud to you.
So taking measures to protect your hearing is a wise decision.
The better you safeguard your hearing today, the more treatment possibilities you’ll have when and if you are inevitably diagnosed with hearing loss.
Receiving treatment can enable you to lead a fulfilling life, even if total recovery is not achievable.
To determine what your best choice is, make an appointment with our hearing care specialist.
