Most of us at some time or other in our life time have experienced a ringing sound in our ears this is usually experienced after attending a live concert or being close for any length of time to industrial noise.

Often this ringing sound will fade and we don’t suffer from any adverse affects, but for over 60 million people worldwide it is something that they have live with 24 hours a day every day of there lives.

Forms of Tinnitus

• The most common form is a roaring, hissing or generally high pitched ringing or whistling sound.
• A clicking or heartbeat type of noise.
• The most common form of tinnitus is called subjective tinnitus where the sufferer hears a sound that others cannot.
• A far rarer type of tinnitus is objective tinnitus where sometimes your Doctor can hear the sound when they listen closely for it.

What Causes Tinnitus?

Tinnitus is not actually a disease but rather a sign that something else is happening with your body in either your hearing or your brain. Usually the most common occurrence of tinnitus is the onset of hearing loss either through age, trauma to the ear or the ear becoming damaged in some way.

Excessive bone tissue will often build up around the stapes which is a bone in the middle ear, which then cause the stapes to become fixed in place instead of vibrating as it would normally do when processing sound.

The person suffering from this disease will then experience conductive hearing loss if the nerve associated with hearing is also affected then sensorineural hearing loss will also occur. It is when both types of hearing loss come together in cases such as this that it is described as having mixed hearing loss.

Otosclerosis is the degeneration of the bone in the ear and the onset is more common in during the teenage years or early adulthood the bone will turn to soft spongy bone instead of the hard bone it is supposed to be.

When you’re speaking to someone who is deaf or hard of hearing try to remember these points:

Here we have compiled a dossier of frequently asked questions concerning deafness and hearing loss which you may find helpful.

Don’t automatically assume just because the person is wearing a hearing aid that they will be able to hear you; many cannot so ask if they will be reading your lips.

If the deaf person is going to be reading your lips then don’t start speaking until they are ready and their full attention is focused on you.

Speak very clearly but not slowly just because the person is deaf doesn’t mean that they are slow. Try to avoid exaggerated lip movements and try and keep your facial expressions and gestures natural.

If you’re talking to two or more people and only one of them is deaf then don’t just focus on the people who can hear you, leaving the deaf person out.

Here we have compiled a dossier of frequently asked questions concerning deafness and hearing loss which you may find helpful.

Q: Do deaf people like listening to music?

Studies have shown that many deaf and hard of hearing people do in fact enjoy music as much as those who can hear, the majority of those asked who loved music did have hearing to some extent but all deaf people can feel physical vibrations and this is often felt through music.

Deaf people will even dance to music, they are able to this either by standing close to a solid object such as a counter top or table and rest there hand on it, this way vibrations from the music will be felt through the object. The bass in the sound system is also relied upon as this will give out vibrations also.

As part of my research into deafness I decided to test what it actually felt like to be hard of hearing and in doing so it opened my eyes to what millions of people all over the world had to live with day in and day.

For my test I used industry strength ear plugs, these are the kind that people who work day in and day out with heavy duty industrial machinery use, they are very affective in deadening sound.

I conducted my experiment over a weekend this way my family were home and I could see the effect if any that it had on family life. I went to bed and inserted the plugs into both ears which felt a little strange at first but I wanted to wake and start the day off as hard of hearing.