The Healing Capability of Your Body
The human body normally has the ability to recuperate from cuts, scratches, and fractured bones, although the healing process could vary in duration depending on the damage.
Sadly, there is no cure for the delicate hair cells in your ears once they become damaged.
At least thus far.
Animals have the capability to regenerate damaged cilia in their ears, recovering their hearing, a characteristic that researchers are currently trying to reproduce in humans.
That means you may have an irreversible loss of hearing if you damage the hearing nerve or those little hairs.
When is Hearing Loss Irreversible?
Upon discovering hearing loss, the initial concern that often emerges is whether the hearing will be restored.
Whether it will or not depends on a number of things.
There are two fundamental forms of hearing loss:
- Obstruction-based hearing loss: When there’s something obstructing your ear canal, you can experience all of the symptoms of hearing loss.
Debris, earwax, and growths are some of the things that can cause a blockage.
Your hearing generally returns to normal after the obstruction is eliminated, and that’s the good news. - Hearing loss due to damage: But there’s another, more widespread type of hearing loss that makes up around 90 percent of hearing loss.
Known clinically as sensorineural hearing loss, this type of hearing loss is often irreversible.
Here’s how it works: tiny hairs in your ear vibrate when struck with moving air (sound waves).
These vibrations are then transformed, by your brain, into signals that you hear 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 lead to sensorineural hearing loss.
In some instances of extreme hearing loss, a cochlear implant might have the ability to enhance hearing function.
A hearing examination can help in identifying if hearing aids would improve your ability to hear.
Treatment of Hearing Loss
Sensorineural hearing loss currently can’t be cured.
Treatment for your hearing loss may, however, be an option.
Advantages of proper treatment for your well-being:
- Ensure your overall quality of life is unaltered or remains high.
- Effectively manage any of the symptoms of hearing loss you might be suffering from.
- Take care of your remaining hearing to avoid added damage.
- Keep solitude away by remaining socially engaged.
- Stop mental decline.
This treatment can take many forms, and it’ll normally depend on how extreme your hearing loss is.
One of the most common treatment options is rather simple: hearing aids.
What Role do Hearing Aids Play in Dealing With Hearing Loss?
Individuals experiencing hearing loss can make use of hearing aids to detect sounds which will allow them to function more effectively.
Tiredness occurs when the brain needs to work harder to process sound.
Scientists have come to realize that prolonged mental inactivity presents a significant danger to cognitive health, as new findings shed light on the importance of ongoing mental stimulation.
Your mental function can start to be recovered by using hearing aids because they let your ears hear again.
As a matter of fact, using hearing aids has been shown to slow cognitive decline by as much as 75%.
Modern hearing aids allow you to concentrate on particular sounds you want to hear while minimizing background noise.
Prevention is The Best Protection
If you take away one thing from this little lesson, 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 probably have it cleared.
But that doesn’t lessen the danger posed by loud sounds that you may not think are loud enough to be all that harmful.
That’s why making the effort to safeguard your ears is a smart plan.
The better you protect your hearing now, the more treatment possibilities you’ll have when and if you are eventually diagnosed with hearing loss.
Treatment can help you live a great, full life even if a cure isn’t possible.
To determine what your best choice is, schedule an appointment with our hearing care professionals.