How Your Body Recovers From Injury and Illness
The physical body normally has the ability to recover from cuts, scratches, and fractured bones, although the recovery process might differ in duration depending on the injury.
But you’re out of luck when it pertains to repairing the little hairs in your ears.
At least thus far.
Animals can repair damage to the cilia in their ears and get their hearing back, but people don’t have that ability (though scientists are working on it).
That means you could have a permanent loss of hearing if you damage the hearing nerve or those little hairs.
When is Hearing Loss Permanent?
The initial thing you consider when you find out you have hearing loss is whether it can return.
Whether it will or not is dependent on a number of factors.
There are a couple of fundamental forms of hearing loss:
- Obstruction-based loss of hearing: When there’s something blocking your ear canal, you can experience all the symptoms of hearing loss.
Earwax, debris, and irregular growths can potentially obstruct the ear canal.
The good news is, your hearing generally recovers once the obstruction is eliminated. - Damage-related hearing loss: A more prevalent form of hearing impairment, responsible for roughly 90 percent of all cases, is triggered by damage instead of other factors.
Known clinically as sensorineural hearing loss, this type of hearing loss is usually permanent.
Here’s how it works: tiny hairs in your ear vibrate when hit with moving air (sound waves).
Your brain changes these vibrations into auditory signals that are perceived by you as sound.
But your hearing can, over time, be permanently harmed by loud noises.
Sensorineural hearing loss can also be caused by injury to the inner ear or nerve.
A cochlear implant can help restore hearing in some instances of hearing loss, especially in severe cases.
A hearing test will help you identify whether hearing aids will help enhance your hearing.
Treatment of Hearing Loss
There is currently no cure for sensorineural hearing loss.
But it might be possible to obtain effective treatment.
Advantages of proper treatment for your well-being:
- Maintain a good total standard of living and well-being.
- Successfully manage any of the symptoms of hearing loss you might be dealing with.
- Preserve and safeguard the hearing you still have.
- Keep solitude away by continuing to be socially active.
- Stop cognitive decline.
This treatment can take many forms, and it’ll normally be dependent on how severe your hearing loss is.
A typically recommended and relatively straightforward strategy is the use of hearing aids.
What Role do Hearing Aids Play in Managing Hearing Impairment?
People who have hearing loss can use hearing aids to help them perceive sounds, allowing them to work as efficiently as they can.
Fatigue is the consequence when the brain strains to hear.
Scientists have come to recognize that extended mental inactivity presents a substantial risk to cognitive health, as new discoveries shed light on the importance of continuous mental stimulation.
Hearing aids help you recover your mental function by allowing your ears to hear again.
As a matter of fact, utilizing hearing aids has been shown to diminish mental decline by as much as 75%.
Cutting-edge hearing aids enable you to focus in on specific sounds you wish to hear while minimizing background noise.
The Best Defense is Prevention
If you take away one thing from this article, hopefully, it’s this: you need to protect the hearing you have because you can’t depend on recovering from hearing loss. Certainly, if you get something stuck in your ear canal, you can most likely have it removed.
However, this doesn’t decrease the danger posed by high-volume noises, which can be damaging even if they don’t seem excessively loud to you.
That’s why making the effort to protect your ears is a smart idea.
The better you safeguard your hearing now, the more treatment potential you’ll have when and if you are inevitably diagnosed with hearing loss.
Getting treatment can enable you to live a fulfilling life, even if complete recovery is not achievable.
To identify what your best option is, make an appointment with our hearing care specialist.