Learn about Hearing Loss & Ringing in the Ears

Our ability to hear is not the same as our ability to understand. Hearing sensitivity is a function of the ear. Speech understanding is a function of the brain. The outer ear, ear drum, ossicles, cochlea etc. function to collect sound and transmit it to the auditory cortex of the brain. There the brain must translate what the ears have collected into something that it can understand. If hearing loss prevents the ear from picking up all of the sounds of speech then the amount of information that the brain has to work with becomes limited and speech understanding suffers. If this lack of stimulation goes unchecked for many years the brain effectively forgets how to process speech. It’s a case of use it or loose it and thus why early diagnosis of hearing loss and early intervention with the proper hearing aids is so important.

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Hearing vs. Understanding

There are two primary components of speech; volume and clarity. These contribute to our understanding. The volume of words comes from loud, low frequency vowel sounds that we make with our vocal cords. The clarity of words comes from soft, high frequency consonant sounds that we make with our lips and teeth. If high frequency hearing loss prevents us from hearing the soft sounds at the beginning of a word and we only hear the loud vowel sounds, then we don’t know if the person speaking said, Hat, Cat, or Sat. We just hear, “at” and accuse the speaker of mumbling. This seems worse in a noisy place like a restaurant because all of the sound waves colliding in the air further exaggerate the condition and the auditory environment just seems like a dull roar.

Ringing in the Ears

Crickets, ringing, buzzing, static, humming are all symptoms of high frequency hearing loss. It may be louder or softer at times and is usually more noticeable when it’s quiet. Many people have it and simply learn to ignore it, but others can’t seem to ignore it and are bothered constantly. How can you manage it?


Tinnitus is a symptom, not a disorder by itself. The most common cause of tinnitus is hearing loss. This condition presents two simultaneous complaints: “I hear but I don’t understand” and “My ears buzz or ring.” There can be other factors involved that cause or contribute to tinnitus to lesser extents. High doses of aspirin, some prescription medications and excessive caffeine can all contribute to increased tinnitus, but by and large the most common condition I see in the office is hearing loss itself.

Hearing Loss and How Hearing Aids Make a Difference

Hearing aids used on a regular, daily basis can provide great improvement in not only hearing but understanding as well. Research shows that most people with hearing loss wait seven years between the time that they first start having problems and the time that they get a hearing test. In this time period, the brain is losing practice at understanding. If the hearing loss is too severe and goes on for too long there is always a chance that it can not be improved, but almost always, patients who choose to correct their hearing loss sooner rather than latter and who wear their hearing aids often will hear and understand speech much better.

An accurate examination can reveal exactly where the deficit lies along the spectrum of speech sounds and which type of hearing aid circuitry and programming will best aid the listener in regaining the ability to understand speech more clearly. This is where the experience and training of your audiologist in Conway comes into play in order to incrementally give the user the correctly prescribed settings, in the correctly prescribed amount of time so that the brain can be appropriately reintroduced to the subtle differences between consonant sounds.

Hearing loss is the 3rd most prevalent chronic condition in older adults behind hypertension and arthritis. The majority of hearing loss, 90%, in adults is sensorineural, for which hearing aids are the only treatment available. Hearing aids are also a viable treatment option for conductive hearing losses where surgery is not an option.

Hearing Loss Myths Debunked

  • "My doctor told me that hearing aids won't help me."

    After 25 years of practicing clinical audiology, I still hear this from patients. Fortunately, I hear this because those patients wanted a second opinion and came to see me anyway. How many patients didn't seek help because of this advice? Your family doctor may not have the expertise to tell you the potential benefits of amplification, or to even diagnose your condition. Often, they conclude that if their patient can hear them well in the exam room, then there must not really be a problem. Even patients with the most severe hearing loss can function well in an enclosed environment, only 2 feet from the face of their doctor with no other noise in the room. In fact, most general practitioners spend less than one week studying in detail the anatomy and neuro physiology of the inner. The only reason that hearing aids were ever developed over a century ago was to help people who have "sensory" or "nerve" hearing loss. This condition cannot be treated with medications or surgery…therefore the ONLY effective treatment option is the use of hearing aids. In plain English, your doctor was wrong and hearing aids DO help patients with sensory neural hearing loss.

  • "My (father/friend/aunt) had a hearing aid and it whistled and squealed all of the time."

    This is a complaint that our patients do not experience. Our expert knowledge and experience in computer programming using the latest hearing aid technology will prevent your hearing aids from "squealing" or "whistling". This is a complaint of outdated or improperly fit hearing aids.

  • "My friend has a hearing aid and never wears it." -

    We call these "brother-in-law" stories. To examine these types of statements we need much more information: What type of hearing loss does he have? How long did he have hearing loss before trying a hearing aid? What is the exact manufacturer, model and style of the hearing aids? (There are over 50 manufacturers of hearing aids and each manufacturer has hundreds of models and combinations). How old are the hearing aids? Did he see a Doctor of Audiology or a hearing aid salesman? This blanket statement has prevented thousands of people from seeking help with their hearing. You cannot base your future potential outcome on someone else's past experiences. We are the experts in Arkansas at evaluating auditory function and treating hearing loss with hearing aids and we guarantee your satisfaction with a 30 day trial period. In fact our return rate is less than 5%. This means that over 95% of patients who try Arkansas Hearing Solutions hearing aids for 30 days make a decision to keep them.

  • "My hearing isn't bad enough yet to start using hearing aids now."

    Wrong! If you have been diagnosed with sensory neural hearing loss the time to begin wearing hearing aids is today. You see, your problem is not that you can't hear. Your problem is that you don't understand what you hear. "Understanding" and "hearing" are different activities. Your ears don't "understand" anything. They are simply a mechanism for picking up the sound and sending them to your brain. The auditory cortex of your brain is where speech is "understood". So…if your ears can't pick up all of the sounds they can't send a full signal to the brain. Without a complete auditory signal the brain can't interpret, or "understand" what is being said. Over time the parts of your brain that interpret speech begin to lose practice and become less efficient in processing speech. Use it or lose it.

    We measure hearing and loudness in decibels. The normal human ear can only sometimes detect a 2 decibel change in sound if given the sounds back to back. Now imagine that you lose 2 decibels of hearing a year and 15 years goes by. Now you have lost 30 decibels of hearing which is the equivalent of wearing the best ear plugs made. You don't recognize that your hearing has declined significantly, but don't worry...everyone else has noticed.

    As time passes your brain forgets how to hear without adequate stimulation. Ten years may go by, then 15 years, 20 years…You wake up one day and decide that you finally HAVE to get help, but your brain hasn't been practicing hearing and decoding sounds for decades. This makes the transition back to hearing sounds again more difficult. This procrastination and denial of hearing loss is almost without exception the number one reason why some people take longer to adapt to the world of better hearing. If you suspect that you have a hearing loss, now is the time to get your hearing evaluated. If you are told that you have sensory neural hearing loss and need hearing aids then now is the time to start retraining your brain how to process sound the way that it used to.


  • "I can hear, but I can't understand."

    The reason that it sounds like people are mumbling is that we tend to lose our hearing for the soft high pitched consonant sounds of speech first. These soft consonant sounds give us the clarity of speech, while the low pitched, loud vowel sounds give us the volume of speech.

     Say these words out loud…sat, hat, cat, that. Now only make the sounds of the beginnings of those words using the first letters… s, k, h, th. When we lose our ability to clearly hear these soft high pitched consonants made with the lips and the teeth, then only the vowel sounds come through and we hear at instead of sat or cat or hat and think that they were mumbling their words.

    "People mumble when they talk these days. No one knows how to speak clearly anymore, especially these kids." - It would be difficult to image that EVERYONE who speaks to you "mumbles" their words. It is something within our human nature that causes us not to accept our own decline in hearing and place the blame for not hearing well on others not speaking well. This relates to the above mentioned slow progression of hearing loss. If you were reading the newspaper and it was blurry every day, you wouldn't accuse the newspaper people of not knowing how to run a printing press. You would go have your vision checked. However, when we don't "understand" other people's speech clearly we tend to place the blame on them, before even considering that maybe we don't hear as well as we once did. "They won't speak up." "They mumble when they talk." "They don't enunciate clearly." "They..."


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