The Healing Capability of Your Body
The human body can generally repair scrapes, cuts, and broken bones, though some injuries take longer than others.
Unfortunately, there is no cure for the delicate hair cells in your ears once they are damaged.
Up to this point, at least.
Animals can repair damage to the hair cells in their ears and get their hearing back, but human beings don’t have that ability (although scientists are working on it).
If you damage the hearing nerves or the little hairs, you could experience permanent hearing loss.
At What Point Does Hearing Loss Become Permanent?
The initial thing you think of when you find out you have hearing loss is whether it will come back.
Whether it will or not is dependent on a number of things.
Two principal forms of hearing loss:
- Obstruction-based hearing loss: When there’s something obstructing your ear canal, you can experience all the symptoms of hearing loss.
Earwax, debris, and abnormal growths can potentially block the ear canal.
Your hearing generally returns to normal after the blockage is eliminated, and that’s the good news. - Hearing loss caused by damage: But there’s another, more widespread type of hearing loss that makes up about 90 percent of hearing loss.
This distinct form of hearing loss, known as sensorineural hearing loss in medical terms, is frequently irreversible.
Here’s the way it works: tiny hairs in your ear move when hit with moving air (sound waves).
Your brain changes these vibrations into auditory signals that are perceived by you as sound.
Prolonged exposure to loud noises can, however, lead to permanent damage to your hearing.
Injury to the inner ear or nerve can also trigger sensorineural hearing loss.
A cochlear implant can help restore hearing in some instances of hearing loss, particularly in extreme cases.
A hearing examination can help in determining if hearing aids would enhance your ability to hear.
Treatment of Hearing Loss
Sensorineural hearing loss presently has no cure.
Treatment for your hearing loss might, however, be an option.
Benefits of proper treatment for your well-being:
- Make sure your general quality of life is unaffected or remains high.
- Effectively address any symptoms of hearing loss that you may be encountering.
- Protect your remaining hearing to avoid additional damage.
- Keep solitude away by remaining socially engaged.
- Stop mental decline.
The kind of treatment you obtain for your hearing loss will vary depending on the severity of the problem.
A frequently encouraged and fairly straightforward strategy is the use of hearing aids.
What Role do Hearing Aids Play in Dealing With Hearing Loss?
Individuals experiencing hearing loss can use hearing aids to detect sounds which will allow them to function more effectively.
Tiredness happens when the brain has to work harder to process sound.
As scientists develop more insights, they have identified a more significant threat of mental decline with a persistent lack of cognitive input.
Your cognitive function can begin to be restored by using hearing aids because they let your ears hear again.
Studies have shown that using hearing aids can dramatically delay cognitive decline, with some studies indicating a decrease of up to 75%.
Contemporary hearing aids will also allow you to pay attention to what you want to hear while tuning out background sounds.
The Best Protection is Prevention
If you take away one thing from this article, hopefully, it’s this: you should safeguard the hearing you have because you can’t count on recovering from hearing loss. Certainly, if you get something stuck in your ear canal, you can probably have it removed.
But that doesn’t decrease the danger posed by loud noises that you might not think are loud enough to be all that hazardous.
That’s why making the effort to protect your ears is a good plan.
The better you protect your hearing today, the more treatment potential you’ll have when and if you are eventually diagnosed with hearing loss.
Treatment can help you live a wonderful, full life even if a cure isn’t a possibility.
To identify what your best option is, schedule an appointment with our hearing care professionals.