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Recent reports have said that the face masks we wear to protect ourselves and others from ‘Covid-19’ have helped reveal a new health issue facing those with hearing impairments.
Reports indicate that audiologists across the United States have noticed a slight increase in visits from patients who realized their addiction to lip reading and facial expressions after people started wearing face masks covering their noses and mouths. .
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“Most likely, these are people who have suffered from some type of hearing loss before, but have been able to cope with it,” said Andrea Gomert, director of the Hearing Aid Clinic at the University of Texas at the University of Texas. Callier Center for Communication Disorders in Dallas.
Most of the time, hearing loss occurs gradually and people often wait around seven years to have a hearing test, according to audiologists, the specialists who assess hearing.
“We would have finally seen these people, but it would have been a few years before we saw the doctors, not now,” said Kathryn Palmer, director of audiology at UPMC Healthcare in Western Pennsylvania.
Audiologists explain that the lack of visual expressions only makes hearing difficult, and that plastic masks and barriers also reduce the level of sound, as well as “Covid-19” makes us adhere to social distancing which pulls us away from the person we’re talking to, which is another mechanism that should adapt to that.
Palmer, who has just completed her term as president of the American Academy of Audiology, said people with normal hearing can control whether sounds are slightly muffled, but those with hearing loss face a period of time. much more difficult.
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The visual image is a “powerful adjunct” to hearing, said Nancy Tay-Murray, professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
“Most people with hearing loss don’t realize that they are very dependent on the picture, and even people with normal hearing depend on it, for example, when you are in a noisy restaurant,” she added.
Palmer noted that adults can usually fill in the blanks and find words they can’t hear, but it’s exhausting.
Once people get hearing aids, they realize that “a lot of that listening effort is given up,” said Laurie Delia, an audiologist at Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.
Palmer noted that masks pose another problem for those who wear hearing aids – they lose or damage hearing aids.
Source: Fox News
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