The Audiology Condition

This section has been highlighting noise of all types. Unscientific polls in our offices asked clients on their preference for noisy (20% voted for it) or silent (80%want it) lifestyles. In general, the research and the readers agree that noise distracts, interferes with speech understanding, and contributes to cognitive overload. All well and good, but whether you LIKE noise or

HHTM Staff: Do we discuss the sounds that people need to hear?  There are times in the office people will state they don’t need to hear those annoying softer sounds, but here we highlight and pass along some areas we don’t normally think of.   What’s Your House Saying to You? My soft water conditioner hummed along in a remote

By Patty Tillman Johnson   From the HHTM Editor:  Today’s post continues the series on noise in a variety of forms.  Please welcome Patty Tillman Johnson, AuD, as this week’s guest writer; her article on noise exposure from hunting firearms and remedies for the same, will have follow up posts.    It’s that time of year again: hunting season! Depending

HHTM Staff: We mention at HHTM that Noise Induced Hearing Loss (NIHL) is so much a part of the everyday life of Audiologists that we tend to take it for granted, assuming that everyone knows how bad Noise is for your hearing.  This thought has prompted some self evaluation which will produce more posts on Noise which define NIHL and

We like to keep it light and easy here at HHTM, if for no other reason than getting older and not hearing well is hard sledding, so why make a visit to an audiologist any harder than it has to be?  But, like the proverbial duck floating smoothly on the surface, there’s a whole lotta action going on below the

HHTM Staff All of us have taken shortcuts on the calculated risk that the odds are on our and the patient’s side. Short cuts are just that — they save time and eliminate sidetracks.  In the case of hearing loss, shortcuts allow the clinician to cut to the chase and fit hearing aids so the person can hear better.  The

HHTM Staff: Most of us have been hospitalized overnight at some point and ALL of us can report that hospitals are noisy places. We didn’t need research to tell us that, but there is now research confirming hospital noise, providing noise level data, and measuring noise effects on sleep.  Read on for this and our fanciful solutions.    The study,

HHTM Staff: Preliminary research from Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco suggests certain vision problems in older adults is associated with a 50% higher risk of hearing loss.  Here is a summary of the research by Marilyn Schneck and colleagues: 446 adults with a mean age of 79.9 years had their hearing screened and underwent an extensive series of

HHTM Staff: Regular readers of HHTM know that we are keenly interested in research related to Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia as well as general aspects of physical and mental health, especially as they relate to hearing loss.  Links between uncorrected hearing loss and mental disorders (depression, dementia) are fast becoming clear, though causal relationships remain unclear.  What we do

When we are providing hearing health to our clients, do we consider their hearing loss and the smoke detectors in their homes? Did you know that the standard signal emitted by most commercially available residential smoke detectors falls between 3,000-4,000 Hz? Furthermore, the majority of residential fires occur between 11pm and 7am when most people are sleeping. According to Bruck