Music can have positive effects on health. Some studies show how it can reduce stress, improves mood, lessens anxiety, improves memory, improves exercise, eases the pain, improves cognition, and provides comfort. Experts explain that this is basically the reason why you would tend to feel happy or pumped up when the DJ plays your favorite music.
Unfortunately, too much of anything can be dangerous. And that includes music too. This is what Jiao Wenchao, a 31-year-old college teacher, realized after he starts having hearing problems.
Like everybody else, Wenchao loves music. Unfortunately, he tends to listen to his favorite songs on high volume. This created a negative impact on his ears.
After his visit to his doctor, he found out that his ears are starting to deteriorate, which could probably affect his ears' ability "to hear high-frequency sounds". His case is referred to as neurological hearing loss, as reported by China Daily.
Pan Tao, an otologist from the Peking University Third Hospital in Beijing, noticed how patients with the same situation have been increasing recently. He added, "Even some teenagers are among them".
The expert also shared how they tried to investigate the reason behind the increasing rate. Tao shared their research revealed that one of the reasons why more and more people are suffering from hearing problems is their bad habits of "making phone calls or listening to music for too long and at high volume."
The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released a statistics that shows about 1.1 billion young adults and teenagers, aged between 12 and 35, are at the verge of losing their sense of hearing because of being too exposed to audio devices in an unsafe mode. Among these people, 50 percent of them "were exposed to unsafe levels of sound from personal audio devices". Meanwhile, 40 percent of them "were exposed to potentially damaging levels of sound at entertainment venues".
There are several signs that could possibly lead to hearing loss. Some of those signs are the difficulty of hearing consonants, listening to the words that have a noisy background, and understanding the words other people say, according to Mayo Clinic. Also, another sign is muffling of sounds and speech.
Though there isn't really a standard when it comes to safe listening, experts' advice if you want to care for your ears, never expose yourself to extremely loud and prolonged sounds. Not doing so might lead to permanent damage especially in your ears' sensory cells.
