Hearing International

As we saw last week at Hearing international, the road to a working portable electric hearing instrument involved a series of inventions such as the telephone and the carbon microphone before Miller Reese Hutchinson put the parts together and presented the world with a working electronic hearing device.  Recall that the carbon microphone was invented in 1878 and by 1896 or so Hutchinson presented his

Fought between 1861 and 1865 over the issue of slavery, the American Civil War was one of the bloodiest wars ever, with 620,000 soldiers losing their lives on both the Union and Confederate sides. Since the Confederacy lost the war, life in the southern part of the United States was difficult in the post War days. As the South was rebuilt and readmitted

Now what could the Leaning Tower of Pisa possibly have to do with structure of the ear?  Here’s the story of how Pisa influenced an explanation of how the cochlea is constructed and how it relates to other spirals that occur in nature. First The Background In the late 10th and 11th centuries, the Republic of Pisa was a Tuscan powerhouse nation.  At

Agriculture is an industry in which workers encounter a wide variety of occupational exposures. The physical hazards from chemicals, accidents, agricultural machinery, animals and other hazards often result in immediate and obvious injuries that are easily recognized. Noise that accompanies many farming tasks causes the more insidious onset of noise-induced hearing loss. Farming is ranked among the top occupations with the highest

 Audiologists and other health professionals around the world have recognized for decades that noise exposure is a health hazard.  Governments worldwide control the amount of noise exposure for known hazard occupations such as manufacturing, construction, and other high noise work places. Just as noisy and sometimes much worse, recreational noises such as firearms, motorcycles, race tracks, music, and other loud

 The brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life is called Neuroplasticity. The neuroplasticity process allows the neurons (nerve cells) in the brain to compensate for injury and disease by adjusting their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment.  Medicine.Net (2015) describes the process as brain reorganizing by “axonal sprouting” where undamaged axons grow

This week’s Hearing International has been in the making for a few weeks. This week’s post is by Dr. Jackie Clark presenting the Coalition for Global hearing Health and its conference coming up in October. This 6th Coalition for Global Hearing Health Conference, hosted at Gallaudet University from October 9th – 10th, 2015, promises to exceed all of its own past conference records

It creeps in slowly in the dark of night, and once inside, it almost never goes away.  It’s known as the Hum, a steady, droning sound that’s heard in places as disparate as Taos, New Mexico; Bristol, England; Kokomo, Indiana; Auckland, New Zealand; Largs, Scotland and, as it turns out, many other places. While reports of “unidentified humming sounds” pop

My first clinical encounter with auditory hallucinations occurred during an early 1980s tinnitus study while I was Director of Aural Rehabilitation at the University of Northern Colorado.  At the time, we were experimenting with biofeedback in the clinic to facilitate relaxation that, in some patients, seemed to reduced their tinnitus.  One of our patients was an 89-year-old woman who had recently lost her husband.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) these are the current facts on deafness and hearing loss around the world: 360 million people (328 Million and 32 Million children) worldwide have disabling hearing loss (40 dB or greater for the better ear for adults)(greater than 30 dB in the better ear for children). The majority of people with disabling hearing loss