Of our five senses – sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste – which would you miss most if you lost it? What a very difficult question!
Helen Keller once said, “Blindness separates us from things but deafness separates us from people.” Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay mused that she would rather be blind than deaf because our visual memory is more precise and more lasting than our auditory memory. We can easily close our eyes and picture a bird but can we recall, with the same clarity, its song?
Research published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, which collects health information nationally, shows that nearly 20% of our population over the age of 12 has a degree of hearing loss that interferes with day-to-day communication. Of those over 65, 43% are hearing impaired. These people, as Helen Keller noted, are separated in varying degrees from family and friends.
This column, which will appear twice monthly in this space, will deal with hearing loss, the many ways in which it affects lives and the solutions available. With more than 34 years spent serving hearing-impaired persons and those with balance disorders in North Florida and South Georgia, I have a wealth of information and experience to share. I hope you will find the column interesting as well as helpful and I invite your participation. We’ll be exploring the origin and detection of hearing loss, as well as its social implications, hearing loss prevention, balance function, devices available for help and strategies for improving communication.
If you have questions that might be answered in the column, or ideas for topics to discuss, please send them to me at:
Kendall P. Varney, M.S., AUD
Hearing Care Resources, Inc.
E-mail: kendall@coastalhearingandbalance.com
Your ideas will certainly be considered and are appreciated.
Kendall P. Varney
Bachelor of Science, Electrical Engineering, University of Florida
Master of Science, Audiology, University of South Florida
Fellow, American Academy of Audiology