A medical emergency

Hearing correctly is part of daily life for most of us.  As happens in most of the body’s functions, hearing doesn’t deserve our attention until we experience problems.  The Sudden Sensorioneural Hearing Loss (SSHL), or sudden hearing loss, is a quick loss of hearing.  It can happen to a person from one moment to the next or inside a period of up to 3 days.  It should be considered a medical emergency, for which a person experiencing this type of disorder should immediately consult a doctor, who can determine if it is a SSHL by making a routine audition test.  Which are the parameters?

Sound is measured in units called decibels.  The level of decibels is what we call volume.  A normal conversation is around 60 decibels.  Another way to characterize sound is the frequency of a sound wave, and differs one type of sound from another one.  If the doctor discovers a loss of at least 30 decibels (half of a normal conversation) in three of the frequencies our ear can hear, there can be a SSHL diagnosis.

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