10/20/2014
PATIENT INFORMATION- SENSORINEURAL HEARING LOSS
The following information is provided to people, their families and friends who have hearing loss to help facilitate communication in the home, social and business situations.
There are two types of basic hearing loss. The first is the conductive or mechanical loss where the sound waves from the environment simply cannot get into the inner ear in order to trigger an impulse in the hearing nerves. Examples of this kind of loss would be earwax or possibly mastoid infections. Since most of these types of hearing loss are correctable, I will not cover those types of losses in this discussion.
The second and perhaps in may ways more bothersome type of hearing loss is nerve deafness. In this situation, damage has occurred to the nerve cells of hearing either from disease or some kind of injury or possibly an inherited condition. This can not only damage the nerve cells in the inner ear, but also can be the result of damage to the brain centers of hearing. There are really two components involed in nerve deafness. The first of these is whether or not the individual actually can hear the sound. The second component is how well the inner ear and brain process whatever sound gets to them. These are, in fact, two separate functions. Many people with nerve deafness will state that they hear the sound, but cannot understand what is being said and this is demonstration of the above point. Also, people who have nerve deafness have increased difficulty in noisy environments.
Extraneous noise impairs their ability to process the sounds and thus they have more trouble understanding conversation when they are in noisy environments.
People in general with any kind of hearing loss which has been longstanding, realize that they have better luck understanding conversational speech if they are able to watch the speaker’s face as someone speaks to them. What is actually happening is the person’s brain has learned to lip read subconsciously or otherwise, and thus can make up for some of the sounds not heard by seeing those sounds being made.
Hearing aids improve the person’s ability to hear sounds around them, including environmental sounds as well as human voices, but can do very little to improve the person’s ability to comprehend or process the sounds that are provided.
People with hearing loss, as well as family and acquaintances, need to be aware that they should never carry on a conversation with someone who is not in the same room as them. This means that if the hard of hearing person wants to speak to someone, they should go to the room where the other person is before starting a conversation. Likewise, if a family member, acquaintance, or friend wishes to speak to someone with a significant hearing loss, they should go find the person, get in the same room with them, and then alert the hard of hearing person that they are going to speak to them before they start a conversation. This can be done by simple statement of a person’s name, or perhaps by touching them. And then the hard of hearing person needs to cooperate and look at the person who is trying to speak to them. If a hard of hearing person misses the first few words of a conversation, he or she then spends the rest of the conversation trying to figure out what the conversation is about, so it is extremely important that they be alert before the conversation starts.
Secondly, given the fact that extraneous noise compromises a hard of hearing person’s ability to understand conversational speech, it is important that all outside sources of noise such as TV, be turned off if one is going to carry on a conversation since you cannot do both effectively under these circumstances.
The above measure should be undertaken even when someone has a hearing aid because, as mentioned, the hearing aid does not do much to improve the person’s ability to comprehend conversations.
It can also be helpful if the hard of hearing person will approach others who are trying to speak to him or her with the following statement which will usually prove to be very helpful, “I have a hearing problem. It is important for me to hear what you have to say. You can help me understand what you say if you will look at me and speak clearly.” Most people trying to speak to a hard of hearing person will bend over backwards, under those circumstances to provide the help needed.
