Photo credit: Afta Putta Gunawan
by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
October is National Protect Your Hearing Month. As I have written before, I’m ambivalent about special months or days, whether for health topics or even such favorites as Mother’s Day or Father’s Day. If it’s good to protect your hearing, you should do it every day of every month.You should be kind to your parents every day of the year, not just one special day! I’m not that grumpy, though. I’m willing to make an exception for birthdays, especially my grandchildren.
Seriously though, perhaps a month that calls attention to the need to protect our hearing is a good idea. Most people don’t know that hearing loss is a serious disability, and that noise is dangerous for hearing. Protecting our hearing is easy and inexpensive. If something sounds loud, it’s too loud and our auditory health* is at risk. If the sound volume is within your control, turn down the volume. If not, leave the noisy environment or use hearing protection and your ears will last a lifetime.
*Auditory health includes prevention of noise-induced hearing loss, tinnitus (ringing in the ears) and hyperacusis (a sensitivity to loud noise that doesn’t bother others). The exposure-response relationship for noise-induced hearing loss is well understood. The noise dose that causes tinnitus and hyperacusis are not, but protecting hearing will most likely prevent development of tinnitus and hyperacusis.
