What is Ear Tinnitus? Tests, Treatments and Hearing Aids?

What is Tinnitus?

Tinnitus means the sounds that ring in ears. The other common sounds of tinnitus are whooshing, hissing, whistling, buzzing and humming. Tinnitus may not be cured but it has various relief options that may help you with your hearing issue.

How do you describe your tinnitus?

The first step of curing tinnitus is discovering what are the causes? One of the biggest challenges for tinnitus is finding out that it is tinnitus and not some outside sound. Then is the stage of evaluation and treatment option because everyone experiences it differently. You may face certain questions:

1. How long have you been hearing those sounds?
2. Does it happen in specific part of a day or is it continuous?
3. How loud is the noise?
4. It is bothering you to the point of mental breakdown or is just irritating?
5. Is it the same sound every time or does it changes?

Be prepared with that kind of answers and be honest so the relief treatment may work faster. Once your medical history is being checked, and your thorough inspection is done, there are some tests you have to pass.

Here are the tests:

There are few hearing tests that professionals may administer to get the better understanding:

1. A pitch test: This is the test where you will be told to identify the pitch of the ringing sound. You may want to be honest during this as this will help decide your treatment.
2. Loudness test: This is the level of sound you’re hearing. It is more common for people to experience soft sounds than louder ones.
3. Visual analogue test: This can be used to determine perceived loudness because the tinnitus is often perceived much louder than the decibel level that matches.

What are the treatments?

• If you feel you have become the victim of tinnitus, hearing aids help with the situation. Consult your hearing loss doctor and they will assist you with tinnitus relief treatment. Many hearing aids today even include tinnitus therapy features.
• Tinnitus masking or noise suppression are common treatment option. This type of device is worn in the ear like a hearing aid and produces either a constant signal or tonal beats to compete with the sounds you're hearing.
• You can use white noise generator as tinnitus gets worse in peaceful place. Thus, that could be a blessing as it could help you ignore the constant ringing sound.
• However, the best option is to consult a professional. Remember that you are not alone - tinnitus, while not well-understood, is common. Book an appointment with the hearing professional of Virginia.

Here Are Some Useful Hearing Issue Tips

The fall season is here and lets make it a gorgeous with few of the light and inexpensive hearing tips.

With the fall comes the seasons of soccer and basketball and Christmas and thanksgiving. All these activities including acute hearing and conversing with the people. Because we do not want to embarrass ourselves by replying something wrong to the question, here are some of the useful hearing tips:

1. Football stadiums could get too loud for you and that could worsen your hearing issue. Thus, prepare for this beforehand and consult your audiologist. If you are in the stadium, protecting your hearing is the key. Without proper hearing protection, exposure to 85 dB for longer than eight hours can lead to a permanent hearing loss.
   
   
2. Leaf blower and lawn mower are just not good for your hearing issue. Just like football noise, it could worsen it. Using your leaf blower and lawn mower to remove them from your front lawn can damage your hearing. However, the leaf blower is once a year use but lawnmower has frequent usage. Thus, make sure their decibels are suited for you hearing.
   
   
3. Try wireless accessories as they will help you connect to the people who suffer the same issues as yours. This Halloween and Thanksgiving season, go wireless with the activities like picking pumpkin or apples for the pies. You can also use its directional microphone to enhance one-on-one conversations.
   
   
4. Customize your sound experience with creative hearing devices. These days in the modern generation, when every device is being reconstructed, you can buy hearing aids that will help your custom setting.

To know more about hearing aids, hearing issues and audiologists, contact Evolution Hearing, Virginia.

How to cope with hearing loss at initial stage?

The hearing issue is something that one has had time to believe and get it treated. Hearing loss is quite common, next to eyesight loss. Coping strategies and pretending to hear often go together but that is not the solution. The hearing may damage the quality of your life but does not have to be that way. Contact a good hearing loss doctor and he will assist you to improve the quality of your life by treating your hearing issue and suggesting you the correct hearing aid.

However, here are some of the coping strategies for hearing loss:

1. Lip Reading: When you experience a serious hearing loss, try the lip reading activity. Most of the times, you could easily make out what a person is trying to say when you see their lips moving in a certain pattern. Though it could be really hard when you do not know that person but it helps a certain level.
2. Cupping your ears and scratching it – does not help: Cupping or scratching your ears does not help because; it may not make any difference. When you feel you are hearing less clearly than before, it is better if you run straight to the audiologist and get it diagnosed. The problem could sometimes become worse with scratching it.
3. Nodding and Fake Smiling – doesn’t help either: Sometimes you have to learn things the hard way. In this case, I learned that it’s better to speak up and ask people to repeat themselves 50 times versus nodding along like you’re hearing everything. Why? Well, by nodding and smiling, you’re only doing yourself a disservice. It’s not fun to fake your life.
4. Laughing because others are – very tricky: You laugh because others are laughing could be tricky. You may not know, whether they are making fun of you and you make fool of yourself. In the end, don’t watch for others to laugh before you do. Give yourself the opportunity to hear the joke, enjoy the joke and truly experience the freeing joy of authentic laughter.

Why cope, when you absolutely don’t have to?

Well, do not cope with your hearing because there are many audiologists available to treat your hearing. One such is Evolution Hearing which has best hearing loss doctors in Virginia. To set an appointment, give us a call on 919-670-3258.

A Glass Of Wine – Boon or Bane For Hearing Issue

There are thousands of theories regarding positive and negative effects of drinking. However, there is one theory which says moderate wine drinking could be beneficial for hearing the issue. You may not even require hearing aids for all your life. For everyone worried about hearing loss, the research is yielding important and sometimes surprising results too.

So, here are some of the theories of hearing impairment:

1. A glass of red wine a day keeps the hearing issue away: As a result of the French paradox, people drink lots of red wine a day. But having one or two glasses of red wine a day could avoid the hardening of arteries which could have lead to strokes and other coronary problems. The researchers say that red wine is made up of resveratrol, which reduces inflammation and helps reduce cholesterol. In 2014, a group of researchers in the UK found a theory that they have reported the decreased risk of hearing loss for those who drink occasionally, and even for those who had a drink daily.

2. Too much alcohol – not good: Well, too much alcohol is anyway not good. Very heavy alcohol consumption can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, which is a known risk factor for hearing loss. The alcohol causes hypertension which is not good for the body and apparently for hearing issue as well. It is said that the more you drink, the harder it may be to hear. One of the studies, concluded that “alcohol specifically blunts lower frequencies in the 1000 Hz range, which is the most crucial frequency for speech discrimination.”

3. Cocktail party deafness: As people grow old, they tend to have cocktail party deafness. They shut out all the other conversation and focus on one single conversation. One of the researchers also has discovered that heavy consumption of alcohol can diminish hearing. It becomes clear that when loud partiers raise their voices, they are not only trying to compete with other loud

talkers but also may be compensating for diminished hearing overall after everyone’s had a few too many.

Solution: Well, the solution to avoid any kind of deafness is to avoid intake of excess alcohol.

And if that does not help then, just contact the best audiologists in Charlottesville, Virginia and they will help with every kind of hearing issues like assistive listening device, hearing aids, follow-ups and medications.

Challenge To Understand Speech

An individual with high-frequency hearing loss has difficulty in understanding the speech with a high pitch such as of women and children and birds or the doorbell. Talking to family and friends over the telephone could be equally challenging. High frequencies help with speech understanding, because fricative sounds like S, H, and F are high in pitch. When hearing in the low frequencies is normal, also, hearing the loudness is normal and vowel sounds can still be heard easily. What is not easy is to make out important high-frequency consonant sounds.

The tiny hair cells at the base of cochlea process incoming sounds from external sources. Hair cells in the cochlea can be damaged by a number of factors, like noise, age, ototoxic medications and disease. Age-related hearing loss and noise-induced hearing loss often affect the high frequencies first rather than lower frequency.