Hearing Loss Help  

 by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A person asked: “Is Cipro ototoxic?”

Cipro is one of the brand names of the generic antibiotic Ciprofloxacin. Ciprofloxacin belongs to the Quinolone class of drugs, all of which can be quite ototoxic.

Ciprofloxacin can cause severe hearing loss, loud tinnitus, ataxia, dizziness, nystagmus, vertigo and ear pain. Thus, it is a drug to be taken with caution. Since I’ve had a number of people tell me of their woes after taking Ciprofloxacin, the ototoxic side effects must be relatively common.

For example, one lady explained,

I only took Ciprofloxacin for three days which resulted in profound bilateral hearing loss, tinnitus and inner ear damage that affects my balance.

Here’s another example. A man lost a lot of his hearing after taking Ciprofloxacin. His hearing problems started with “weird” tinnitus. The tinnitus eventually stopped, but his hearing did not improve.

You can check out the ototoxic side effects of any drugs before you take them in “Ototoxic Drugs Exposed“. This book contains information on the ototoxicity of 763 drugs known to damage ears, including Ciprofloxacin.

 by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.
 

Some researchers have apparently discovered that hard of hearing people call in sick more often than employees with normal hearing. Here’s the salient parts of the story.

The extra energy expended on overcoming hearing problems takes its toll on hearing-impaired employees. This may explain why hearing-impaired employees are likely to take more sick-days than their colleagues with normal hearing.

Hearing problems can wear on a hearing-impaired individual’s mental health. A Dutch survey among people in the workplace found that hearing-impaired employees were five times more likely than their co-workers with normal hearing to experience stress so severe that they must take sick-days.

More than 75% of the hearing-impaired respondents had called in sick during the preceding year, as compared to 55% of their colleagues with normal hearing. One in four of the hearing-impaired respondents cited stress and burn-out as the reasons for calling in sick, as compared to just 7% of those with normal hearing. (As reported in “Intl. J. Audiol. 2006;45(9):503-512, via http://www.hearingreview.com/insider/2007-08-30_02.asp.)

What the study apparently overlooked was whether the people in this study had appropriate accommodations made to compensate for their hearing losses, or whether they were just left to fend for themselves as best they could.

One such employee explained,

I totally agree that it takes much more energy at work for hard of hearing people to cope. It certainly did for me. It was a very stressful situation and got worse as the years went by. I would go home at night simply exhausted.

Treating hard of hearing employees like that is a sure recipe for burn-out and resulting absenteeism. However, it does not have to be this way. An employee at another company explained,

 I am fortunate that I am infrequently sick and use less sick leave than most of my colleagues, but I agree that it takes plenty of extra energy to hear well at work.

What is the difference? Look at the above figures again. 25% of hard of hearing people as opposed to just 7% of hearing people cited stress and burn-out as the culprit. There is no need for this disparity if employers would make adequate and proper accommodations for the special communications needs of their hard of hearing employees.

In my experience, when communication needs are properly accommodated, then stress and absenteeism in hard of hearing people are no different than in people with normal hearing.

Therefore, employers, if your hard of hearing people are absent more than “normal,” that is an indictment against your company failing to meet the specific communication needs of your hard of hearing employees.

Often some simple changes are all that you need to implement. It could be as simple as moving a hard of hearing employee to a quiet corner of the office, or providing an amplified telephone, or using email rather than talking to them face to face or on the phone when giving instructions and orders so they know they have “heard” everything correctly.

To find out what changes will meet their needs, ask your hard of hearing employees what specific changes would help them the most. Your reward will be happy, healthy, productive and loyal hard of hearing employees. Isn’t that worth it?
 

 by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.
 

From time to time, the issue arises as to what we (people with a hearing loss) call ourselves. Many of us refer to ourselves as “hard of hearing”. One person with a hearing loss commented: “It’s a stupid expression if you ask me. Hard-of-hearing makes no sense.”

Everyone is free to have their own opinions. However, I am also free to disagree with the above opinion. You see, in MY opinion, the expression “hard of hearing” is actually quite accurate. Here’s why.

Hearing (or more accurately understanding what we hear) is hard. If all we needed was more volume, we would be “soft of hearing,” and hearing aids and assistive devices would give us the extra volume we need. Then hearing would be effortless.

However, amplification isn’t enough. We still often can’t understand what people are saying in spite of the extra amplification. This is because we have less than perfect discrimination. Thus a lot of words are “fuzzy” and sound much the same to us. It takes a lot of effort to try to make sense of what people are saying under these conditions.

For example, we have to strain to hear. We have to go though a lot of mental gymnastics in order to figure out what they might have said. We have to concentrate on the person’s face to speechread. Then our brains have to put together what our eyes see, what our ears hear, what we know about the topic and what we know about the structure of the language. No matter how you slice it, all this is hard work. So yes, in a very real sense, we truly are hard of hearing. No wonder we are wiped out at the end of the day. All this hard work exhausts us.

So I am quite happy to use the term “hard of hearing” as it accurately portrays what I go though every day of my life.
 

 by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A lady wrote:

My hearing loss has been described as “an air gap in the bone.” Whatever do they mean by that?

What you really mean to ask is, “What is an air/bone gap?”

When your audiologist does the pure tone hearing testing (the series of beeps at different frequencies and intensities), the “air” refers to “air conduction” testing using earphones, and the “bone” refers to the “bone conduction” testing using a bone oscillator (vibrator) placed behind your ear on the mastoid bone.

If you have a sensorineural hearing loss (meaning inner ear loss) both the air conduction and the bone conduction results will be similar.

However, if you have a conductive loss (meaning a middle ear loss) then your bone conduction testing results will be better than the air conduction results on your audiogram. This difference between the two lines or your audiogram is called the “air/bone gap”. Thus, the gap is only on your audiogram; it is not a physical gap in some bones in your head.

You could also have both a conductive and a sensorineural hearing loss at the same time. They call this a mixed loss. In this case, you will also have an air/bone gap on your audiogram.

 by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

 A lady wrote:

I took 800 mg of Ibuprofen for pain relief for dental work and found I got tinnitus after that. As soon as I stopped taking the Ibuprofen, which was almost immediately following getting the side effect, the tinnitus stopped as well. Now when I need to use Ibuprofen, I keep the dose to 200 to 400 mg at a time and I don’t get tinnitus. Have others had the same experience?

Good question. Ibuprofen causes tinnitus in 1% to 3% of the people taking it according to the PDR and CPS. Since a lot of people take Ibuprofen each day, that translates into a lot of people getting tinnitus just from using Ibuprofen. However, I don’t have any information on the dose needed to cause tinnitus when taking Ibuprofen.

With a number of drugs, higher doses can cause tinnitus, whereas lower doses of the same drug don’t. Aspirin is one example.

I’ve not heard specifically that tinnitus is dose-related with Ibuprofen, but it may well be. So readers, have any of you found that you can take Ibuprofen at low doses without tinnitus, but tinnitus kicks in with higher doses? Let me know your experiences.

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.
 

According to a recent article in the American Family Physician,

Falls are the leading cause of injury-related visits to emergency departments in the United States, and the primary cause of accidental deaths in persons over the age of 65 years.

The article continues, “More than 90% of hip fractures occur as a result of falls, with most of these fractures occurring in persons over 70 years of age.”

Now, notice the risk factors that cause these falls. They include “increasing age, drugs, cognitive impairment and sensory deficit.” (As reported by Jess Dancer, Ed.D., in Advance for Audiologists, Sep. 14, 2007.)

If you investigate carefully, I think you’ll find that drugs are the main culprit. What most people don’t know is that many of the drugs seniors take are ototoxic. One of the side effects of such drugs is that they affect the balance system in the inner ears, and that results in falls.

How bad is this problem? This just crossed my desk.

Each year 32,000 older adults suffer hip fractures, attributable to drug-induced falls, resulting in more than 1,500 deaths.

That’s a lot of broken hips each year just from taking ototoxic drugs.

The report continues,

In one study, the main categories of drugs responsible for the falls leading to hip fractures were sleeping pills and minor tranquilizers (30%), anti-psychotic drugs (52%) and antidepressants (17%). All of these drugs are often prescribed unnecessarily, especially in older adults. (As reported in Worst Pills Best Pills News, September, 2007.)

Specifically notice the above sentence. Doctors commonly unnecessarily prescribe these drugs for what are essentially minor problems. The result is major problems such as hip fractures and death.

Therefore, if you want to keep your “pins” under you as you age, go easy on the drugs! Make your doctor justify any drugs he prescribes for you. You want to see that the benefits far outweigh the side effects—and as the above cases so powerfully testify, your doctor may be hard-pressed to do this.