Tinnitus :: Health Hearing Loss Noise Loud Essays

Tinnitus A police officer fires his handgun while target practicing. He forgot to put on his ear muffs and suddenly after the shot, he hears a faint buzzing sound. In this example, over time, the ringing will probably fade for the officer. Almost everyone will experience tinnitus in their lifetime. After all, loud noises are impossible to avoid completely. There is only a problem when the sound from the tinnitus does not stop, or it continues to get louder with time. For many people around the world, the ringing, buzzing, hissing or chirping sounds that make up tinnitus (tin-Night-us; Tin-nit-us) or acoustic trauma never go away (Alliance). There are several definitions of the word tinnitus. Tinnitus Away defines it as "a noise heard in the ear, or the sensation of noise as a ringing that is purely subjective." Hear USA says tinnitus is "a noise heard in the ears." According to Tinnitus.com, Tinnitus was defined in 1999 as a sensory disorder. What does all of this mean? Basically, tinnitus is the perception of sound by an individual when there is no external source of that sound. Sound burst hearing loss is due to damage to the auditory receptors, the hair cells, inside the ear. The vibration of these hair follicles is what allows humans to hear so when they become damaged, the auditory sense is set off, and the resulting noise is the sound heard by millions of tinnitus sufferers. The other damage done to the ear by sound bursts that creates hearing loss is the deflation of the cochlea. This damage is usually caused by prolonged exposure to a continuous loud noise. Acoustic traumas are caused by an explosive sound, sudden and loud, that can cause hearing loss (Goldstein, 2002). The effects of these traumas can fade. However, they do not always go away. A college student who had a fire cracker explode in his hand only fifteen inches from his ear still had a ringing sensation two years after the incident. According to the Internet Armory, sound is physically just a rapid change in air pressure above and below the atmospheric pressure. The decibel, dB, named after Alexander Graham Bell, is used to describe this change in pressure. Zero dB is the threshold of human hearing, and 120 dB is the pain threshold. Decibels increase logarithmically so 10 dB is 10 times as powerful as one dB, and twenty dB is ten times as powerful as that.