You might take them for granted, but for most people, ears are
vital to good health. Here’s how to keep them in tip-top shape
There’s a joke among ear, nose and throat doctors that one of the first steps to good ear health is to never put anything bigger than your elbow in your ear.
“Q-Tips keep me very busy,” said Dr. Donald Burt Jr., an ear, nose and throat doctor in Gilroy. “I discourage their use because they cause abrasions of the ear canal, which leads to infections. Also, they often just push the wax in deeper rather than cleaning it out, and that causes wax impaction problems that can be painful.”
Q-Tips are unnecessary, Burt said, because the ear is designed to be naturally self-cleaning. Small hairs in the ear gradually move wax to the front of the ear where it is usually washed away in the shower. As the wax moves, it lubricates the ear and brings dirt along with it, naturally cleaning out the ear, Burt explained. The wax also has natural antibacterial and anti-fungal properties to maintain good ear health.
The second step to maintaining good ear health is investing in ear protection.
“Whenever your going to be doing something that involves loud noise, you should be wearing ear protection,” said Dr. Anita Tolentino-Macaraeg, a pediatrician in Hollister. “Kids are racing motorcycles as young as 12, they’re target shooting and they’re blasting their music. Those things are an assault on the ears, and they can cause hearing problems.”
Though iPods have received attention in the media as a potential cause for hearing damage, Tolentino-Macaraeg said the popular music players are just a modern version of an older problem.
“Before iPods, we had portable CD players, and before that we had the Walkman to play tapes,” she said. “Anything with earphones can be an issue if people are listening to things for too long at a high volume. Children should be educated about their music players, and parents need to explain how loud noises can damage the ears.”
Though MP3 players have the potential to cause hearing damage, it’s too early to know just how much of a problem they really pose, said Dr. Bruce Jacobsen, chief of Otolaryngology at Kaiser Permanente San Jose/Santa Teresa Medical Center. If people only listen to MP3 players or other personal stereo devices for short periods of time at moderate volumes, the potential for damage significantly decreases.
“I think bigger concerns are people who are exposed to high decibels for extended periods of time,” Jacobsen said. “People exposed to that kind of noise are at very high risk for hearing damage. Often, it’s an occupational hazard. At one time, factory workers and people in the military were at the highest risk, but OSHA standards and better education have helped bring those numbers down. Now it’s occupations like gardening, where people are exposed to leaf blowers and things like that, and that OSHA doesn’t necessarily monitor that we’re seeing numbers increasing.”
Though current factory workers’ ears are more likely to be protected, Burt said he sees a lot of people between the ages of 50 and 70 who spent their entire careers working around machinery coming in with hearing problems.
Anything over 85 decibels is bad for ears, Jacobsen said, which is comparable to a motorcycle going 40 to 50 miles per hour.
“My rule of thumb is that if you have to raise your voice to be heard, you’re probably in a situation where you should be wearing ear protection,” he said.
Though people can be conscious of hearing protection and though they may avoid using Q-Tips, chances are, everybody will experience some sort of hearing loss as they get older, Jacobsen said.
“It’s almost unavoidable,” he explained. “As we get older, we naturally lose the ability to hear things that have a higher pitch. It’s absolutely the most common problem I see.”
Hearing loss is one thing people can’t potentially avoid by eating certain foods as they may do to maintain healthy eyes or skin. The best medicine for hearing loss is hearing aids.
“The average time between hearing loss and people coming in to see me about it is about five years,” Jacobsen said. “It’s common to deny hearing loss because people don’t want to wear hearing aids. But hearing aid technology is better than ever. We have digital hearing aids now that can be tuned to the frequency the person wearing it has problems with. They’re very different from older analog hearing aids that just amplify everything. It’s a vanity thing, but if people put vanity aside, hearing aids can really make a huge difference.”
