It’s a permanent condition and it is incurable. Other sounds like the lawnmowers are about 90dB and unlike the sound of a gunshot, you have to be exposed to it non stop for 8 hours before you sustain any serious ear injuries.īut, NIHL is painless, when it first sets in, you might not detect it or you might even wave it off as something that will subside as soon as you take a nap, I mean, you don’t see blood or bruising, so you might think everything is perfectly normal, but sadly once you lose your hearing due to noise exposure, you can’t regain it. To give you some perspective, a gunshot sound is about 140dB loud and all it takes to come down with hearing loss is 1 case, (just 1 case) of shooting without wearing ear protection. Generally speaking, any sound that is louder than 85dB (decibels) is capable of putting your hearing at risk. “ _a_, _ou_ you _ea _ _a_ me _a_ _oo_?”Ĭan they fill in the gaps? Well, maybe if they have some visual cues like seeing the speaker’s lips as they move or if the conversation is happening on the job, at a workplace where they’ve worked for the past couple of years and they pretty much already know the vocabulary and all other things linked to the job.īut aside that, chances of being able to fill in the gaps are pretty slim. So if someone said, “Kate, could you please pass me that book?”Īn average person suffering from NIHL would hear something along the lines of: The high-frequency range comprises sounds like “S”, “K”, “T”, “P” and a host of other consonants. The telltale complains of people with noise-induced hearing loss is that the words they hear are distorted and this is because they experience a hearing loss in the high-frequency part of the hearing range. Is this true? Yes, but that’s not necessarily the full picture.Īs a matter of fact, its manifestations are much more worrying. The myth that makes the rounds is that the major manifestation of noise-induced hearing loss NIHL in people is that it only makes conversations sound muffled or softer.

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