Tuesday, February 06, 2007

5 Ways to Improve Your Hearing

Do you want to improve hearing? I want to improve my hearing.

Once lost, hearing CANNOT be restored with medicines. In such case, you will need hearing aids to compensate for your lack of hearing. To date, none of the so-called all-natural miracle drugs has been proven to work.

This article will talk about the things you can do to improve your hearing NOW, while it's still fully functional. Here are five assorted tips and drills you can do to make sure you maintain your hearing ability:

1) Maintenance is important
Avoid loud noises, as these can damage your eardrums. Listening to loud music or with plug-in headphones, as opposed to the foam or rubber types that just nestle on your ears, is a quick way to lose hearing. Being subjected to incredibly loud, shrill, and irritating noises every day, like gunfire at the shooting range, power tools in your neighborhood, or the vocal assaults of an expressive mother-in-law, are all detrimental to your hearing. Avoid them at all cost.

2) Regular EENT checkups
Make sure to add visiting an EENT (eyes, ears, nose, throat) doctor to your list of bi-annual checkups alongside your usual ones, like visits to the dentist and general medical checkups. This helps maintain all your senses, not just hearing. EENTs can give you preventive medications to treat any mild problems you may have with hearing before these worsen.

3) Vitamins and medication
The following four vitamins and medications have been tested and proven to help in the maintenance of hearing. These haven't been noted to significantly enhance a person's hearing acuity, but they have been known to prevent the deterioration of hearing ability. These four vitamins, with corresponding dosages, are the following: Acetyl-carnitine (150mg a day), alpa-lipoic acid (150 mg a day), glutathione (50 mg a day), and coenzyme Q10 (60 mg a day).

4) Sound source location exercise
Here is the first drill for sharpening your hearing. This helps your ear's directional sense and requires a partner. Buy some small noisemaker like a horn or even a small radio speaker. Go to a large room with very little acoustic bounce off and furniture. If you can do this in an open-air environment so much the better, but you'll look a bit funny to any passerby so you might want to find a private spot.

Now, the drill is simple. Just have your partner sound off small two or three-second bursts around you, starting at a regular distance. Just point where the noise came from. Limit your choices initially to the eight compass points (including northeast etc). Later on, vary the drill by having you partner alter the distance at which he sounds off. You should not only name directions, but the approximate distance away from where the noise was made.

5) Noise filtering exercise
This is a drill for filtering sound. It's simple as well. Tune in to a station that plays a moderately fast music. It should not be too loud. Then, talk to a friend. Do NOT raise your voice and carry on a conversation without leaning to hear better. Then after a few minutes, add a second radio playing a different music. Then later throw in a third... you get the picture. This helps you filter out any extraneous noise and improves your ear's ability to pick out only the sounds you want to hear.

Try these tips and reap the benefits of improving your hearing NOW, while it's still fully functional.

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