Living with Hearing Loss

From Consumer Reports

Listen Up! What You Eat Can Protect Your Hearing
There is a connection between your diet and your ears
By Hallie Levine
September 14, 2020:

“I tell all my patients with hearing loss to follow a heart-healthy diet,” Dr. Woodson says. “If it’s good for your heart, it’s going to be good for your ears, as well.”

Heart-healthy eating patterns, including the three approaches used in Curhan’s studies, are mostly centered on lots of high-quality plant-based foods and low amounts of animal-based foods, refined grains, added sugars, and unhealthy fats. To make it easy, Curhan recommends at each meal filling half your plate with fruits and veggies (but limiting starchy ones, like potatoes). The other half should be made up of whole grains and plant-based protein, such as tofu, lentils, or nuts most days, with fish and modest amounts of lean meat, and poultry less often. Unsaturated oils such as olive or vegetable oils can also be used.”

Follow this link for the full report:

https://www.consumerreports.org/hearing-ear-care/what-you-eat-can-protect-your-hearing-diet-hearing-connection/.

by LOU FANCHER , September 30, 2016 in “San Francisco Classical Voice”

Waking up to find that he was suddenly and entirely deaf in his right ear on June 15, 2010, composer Richard Einhorn’s biggest worry wasn’t that he’d never work again. Nor was his greatest concern the spinning room and nausea, the way human voices sounded like screeching devils riding on crazed, squealing robots, or the piercing tinnitus, buzzing like a high-pitched, enraged refrigerator in his ear. Einhorn knew that he had only 30 percent hearing in his left ear, but didn’t know enough to worry about permanent damage to his other, “good ear.” He attributed the problem to allergies.

Einhorn wasn’t the only person in the world unfamiliar with the term, “Idiopathic Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss,” a medical emergency that occurs when the vestibulocochlear nerve goes wacky and basically, without immediate treatment with steroids, a person abruptly loses hearing forever.

Eventually, learning the cause was not allergies or earwax, as emergency room doctors in the hospital to which he fled first supposed, the then 57-year-old composer’s most monstrous fear was of becoming isolated. Married, with a daughter, accustomed to an interactive social life, Einhorn thought more like an average human being than like a musician. What would dinnertime be like? How would he converse and hear at parties and concerts? Would he be miserably lonely?

“It was easily the worst night of my life,” says Einhorn, in an interview from his home in New York City. “It was devastating on a personal level. It took me well over two years before I could physically and psychologically manage it.” [Full article]

from HearingLikeMe.com, by Stu Nunnery on December 27, 2016:

Does hearing loss affect how we enjoy music? If so, is it possible to regain our enjoyment of music even after hearing loss?

Many of us with hearing loss have stopped listening to music because it does not sound how we remember it. Nevertheless,  more musicians, singers and music lovers with hearing loss are coping and finding their way back to music.

Recently I attended a seminar about the impact of hearing loss and hearing aids on music enjoyment that was hosted and led by Geoff Plant, a hearing rehabilitation specialist, musician and mentor of mine. The seminar explored the challenges of experiencing music after hearing loss, the claim that hearing aids do not always provide a quality musical experience, and strategies being used to more fully enjoy music.

Here’s what I learned…  [Full article]