How to Navigate Hearing Loss: From Symptoms to Solutions
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Welcome to the WebMD Health Discovered Podcast. I'm Dr. Neha Bhatt, WebMD's Chief Physician Editor for Health and Lifestyle Medicine. Today, we're going to discuss hearing loss. If you've ever thought everyone around you is suddenly mumbling, or you've had trouble following conversations in noisy settings, or you're noticing a loved one has trouble tracking conversations when there's a lot of background noise, you

You're not alone. Hearing loss can sneak up on us at any age, often without obvious warning signs. For some of us, hearing loss may be caused by age-related degeneration. For others, it may be caused by consistent noise exposure, certain medications, earwax blockages, chronic ear infections, or even head trauma.

In this episode, we'll take a step-by-step approach to hearing loss and explore the telltale clues that might signal hearing trouble, the screenings and comprehensive tests available to us, and the surprising way hearing loss can affect mental and cognitive health over time.

We'll also break down the practical everyday steps to safeguard your ears, from understanding safe noise levels to recognizing when over-the-counter devices can help and when it's time for deeper assessment. We'll answer some of your most pressing questions like, is that slight hearing difficulty normal as we age? Or could it be hiding an underlying condition?

How can you advocate for yourself or your loved ones during medical appointments to ensure you get the right tests and solutions? But first, let me introduce my guest, Dr. Douglas Beck.

Dr. Beck is a distinguished audiologist with over four decades of experience in clinical, academic, and industry roles. Dr. Beck has held leadership positions at institutions such as the House Ear Institute, St. Louis University, and more, and has served as an editor for major audiology publications. An author with over 255 publications,

He's contributed extensively to audiology, cognition, hearing aids, and neuroscience research. He remains an active global lecturer, consultant, and writer, recently joining the Hearing Matters podcast in 2024 and Essilor Luxottica in December 2024. Welcome to the WebMD Health Discovered podcast, Dr. Beck.

Thank you. It's an honor to be here. Well, I am very, very excited to jump into our conversation. But before we do, I'd love to ask about your own personal health discovery, your aha moment around working with patients as it relates to hearing loss. My aha moment actually started at my fellowship in 1983 or 1984 at the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles. I had

I had the good fortune to be there a few years before the FDA approved cochlear implants for adults. That opened up my eyes to a lot of the neurophysiology and the technology that was about to emerge. And I was at the right place at the right time. And I was just so grateful to have been there. I am really excited to talk about all this entire range of options that are now available to patients. So thank you for kicking us off with that. But before we do, I'd

I'd love to take a step back and just start with the basics. People often think about hearing loss as something that's age-related. Can you talk to us a little bit about hearing loss in general, how we should be thinking about it? Is this really something that we need to start thinking about as we age? Or are there things that we should be thinking about throughout our entire lifespan?

Absolutely. That's such a great question because people rarely understand hearing loss. Hearing is just perceiving or detecting sound. And probably 90% of all people with significant hearing loss can hear. What they can't do is understand. What they can't do is comprehend sound. What they can't do is make sense of sound. So that gets us to the issue that there's

hearing and listening. Hearing is perceiving or detecting sound. Listening is making sense of sound. In the USA, we have about 340 million people. About one out of five of them has hearing loss. There's another 26, 28 million people in the USA with no hearing loss whatsoever.

but they have difficulty understanding, particularly in noise. So when we talk about hearing and listening, these two are intimately involved with each other and you can't really separate one from the other. Hearing is step one. You have to perceive sound, but the bigger task is for your brain to make sense of what you're hearing. Okay, so that's a really interesting distinction that I haven't necessarily thought of before.

I think most of us think about hearing assessments when our children are first born. We recognize that they sort of get this hearing assessment for what you have described as stage one. So the first piece of it, can they hear yes or no? And then we get these assessments during their early childhood as they're entering school. And then we don't necessarily think about assessments or questions

Are there varying stages of losing this ability to hear over the course of our life? And is that impacting our listening over the course of our life? So can you talk to us a little bit about common causes over the course of one's life where you might be at risk for hearing loss? Yes, this is such an important topic. Often in the U.S.A.,

Probably 97, 98% of all births get an immediate hearing test at birth. And that's done through a screening. And there are two types of screening. One is called otoacoustic emissions.

which is where we bounce some sounds off the eardrum and we measure the reflected sound. And then we can also do something called an auditory brainstem response. Again, we just put a little click in the ear and we measure the brain's response. That tells us that the patient or the child is hearing or not hearing. That's as much as it tells us. It doesn't tell us a lot of the detail there. What happens when you get into kindergarten or preschool or something like that, you might have a hearing test.

But those are just screenings. And the problem with the screening for hearing is that they do not test your ability to understand sound. They just say you're hearing or not hearing. And so that is not enough information to really make a good decision. Many children who cannot understand but can hear might have attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia. They might have all sorts of specific language impairments.

And speech and hearing problems often go hand in hand in young children. So the fact that a child passes a hearing test does not mean that he or she will be able to understand the teacher. What we do with tweening tests, it's very interesting how they've evolved. They are essentially looking for ear disease. You know, in children in particular, we're looking to make sure are both ears working and we're looking to see

In essence, you know, does that child have otitis media, a middle ear infection? Do they have a perforated eardrum? Do they have a lot of goo in their ear, which could be earwax, which is also called cerumen, and other physical ailments that relate to ears. But the interesting thing is, and this is in adults, only about 5 or 8% of all hearing loss is caused by a medical problem.

problem. Most of them go back to what you were addressing earlier. Age-related hearing loss, noise-induced hearing loss, ototoxic medications, head trauma. These are things that can cause hearing and listening difficulty.

But when we're screening, we're just really looking for a medical cause to a hearing loss. And honestly, I think we have to change that. I don't think screening in adults or children is appropriate. I think everybody should get comprehensive audiometric evaluation. That is actually what most insurers pay for. And in particular, Medicare actually calls it a comprehensive audiometric evaluation because we know that screenings are just not appropriate for people

who have signs or symptoms of hearing or listening disorders. Screenings are fine to the general population as long as they have no issues with hearing and no issues with listening. A hearing screening is much like a Snellen eye chart in vision. You know those charts

where you stand 20 feet away and you read the smallest line you can. That's useful. It tells you you can see or not see, but it doesn't tell you enough information about your actual visual acuity to make any good decisions about your visual health. So then tell me a little bit more about this comprehensive assessment that you're talking about. What does it entail and what is it going to tell you?

Yes, press the button when you hear the beat. That's a screening. That's not very useful. A comprehensive audiometric evaluation is what the American Academy of Audiology recommends. It's what the American Speech-Language Hearing Association recommends.

It's what the International Hearing Society recommends. What they do in these comprehensive audiometric evaluations is we do the press the button when you hear the beep, that's level one. But then we also do word recognition. We play digitized words into your ears one at a time. We record how well you hear in quiet.

But the reality is most people don't listen in quiet. You listen in noise, and that's where the problems come in. So all three best practice models, AAA, ASHA, and IHS say that you should be doing a speech and noise test. And we have calibrated speech and noise tests that tell us exactly how well or how poorly a person does in difficult, challenging listening situations like family gatherings, like

like cocktail parties, like restaurants. And these are, to me, as an audiologist, far more important than press the button when you hear the beep.

Again, the hearing is not the end all and be all. Listening means that you have heard it and that you can understand it. So if I have to pick between just hearing or just listening, I want a listening assessment because that tells me clinically how is the patient doing functionally? How are they doing in the real world? That to me tells me a lot more than the beeps. Okay, this is great and super helpful. So then I have two questions to follow up on that. So the first is,

Who buys themselves this type of assessment? Is this someone who's noticing, oh, I'm having some difficulty? Or is this something that you're saying should be done periodically throughout life?

And the second question is then at what frequency should these tests be done? The unfortunate situation is that most health care professionals, when they realize a patient is having hearing or listening problems, they'll say, oh, you should go get a screening. And that leads the patient to going and getting a screening. And then we still don't have enough information to speak thoroughly about what's going on with that individual.

I do believe that if I were to write the rules, which I have no power to do, but if I were to write the rules, I would say every child should have a hearing screening at birth, which again is very, very common now. That's called universal newborn hearing screenings.

They should have a comprehensive audiometric evaluation before they enter preschool or kindergarten or elementary school. And then I think if there's no signs or symptoms of any difficulty, they probably don't need it again for five years. But I'd like to see it done every five years. And I think for adults, most adults can't remember if they've ever had a comprehensive audiometric evaluation. What they do instead is they say,

things like this. Everybody mumbles. Have you ever noticed how all of a sudden everybody mumbles? People do not speak clearly anymore. When I was a lad, everybody had to learn to enunciate, you know, and then they'll tell you about selective hearing and all these other things.

And, you know, from their perspective, that is absolutely accurate. They will say people mumble. And from their perspective, absolutely accurate. But you know what's really going on? Is they're really not hearing the high frequencies because of noise-induced hearing loss or age-related hearing loss or ototoxic issues. Maybe they were on loop diuretics for a long period of time. Maybe they were on large doses of over-the-counter meds and it could be aspirin. It could be certain diuretics, antibiotics. And so what happens when

when we have these exposures is we tend to lose high frequencies first. Now there's some new information that's come out of Harvard in the last year or two that's really fascinating. The human ear, as we all know since World War II, really since Bonbeckershi, is that human hearing goes from about 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz.

So a couple of things to know when you're getting a hearing test on an audiogram that only goes from 250 to 8,000 Hertz. So what that means is you're not being tested on any of the notes below middle C on a piano. The entire left side of a piano is not represented on a hearing test further,

When somebody is born with hearing to 18 or 20,000 Hertz, we don't notice on an audiogram any hearing loss until it gets down to 8,000 Hertz. And by the time it's impacting 8,000 Hertz, you've theoretically already lost 10 or 12,000 Hertz, or you have hearing loss way above what's been tested.

And that leads to things like tinnitus. That leads to things like the inability to hear clearly in difficult, challenging situations. People think that both ears are the same and they should be, they should be symmetric. But here's the thing. If you and I were having a discussion right now, and you were one meter to my right ear, my right ear is hearing you at five, six, and 7,000 Hertz at those frequencies.

about 20 decibels louder than my left ear. And so it's very important that we hear all these sounds. That's how people understand what's going on in noise. That's how people are able to localize. That's how people are able to estimate distance based on the difference in loudness and the difference in timing between the two ears. And most people never give this any thought at all. But again, these, these are the reasons that we want to do speech and noise testing. These are the reasons we want to do extended high frequency testing.

These are the reasons that audiologists should be doing listening and communication assessments. And again, all of these are perfectly in alignment with the American Academy of Audiology, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association,

and the International Hearing Society best practice recommendations. Now, unfortunately, only about 15 or 20% of hearing care professionals do that work because it is often limited by your insurance company. You know, they simply won't pay for it. And clinicians are always stuck in the same position. And I'm sure you are as a physician as well, where you know what you want to do, but you also know that the patient is stuck because their insurance won't pay for it. So we tend to do less

We order less than we might perfectly prefer to do. And so as a result, we're making decisions with less information available to us.

Just in what we've discussed so far, you've really helped us sort of identify some of the risk factors. So thinking about noise-induced, age-related, certain medications that might play a role. And you've also given us a really interesting sense of some of the signs or symptoms or red flags that we might be losing our hearing. So the thinking that everyone's mumbling, having this sort of difficulty in conversation with background noise. And you've

You've also gotten into what ideally should be done. So when you start suspecting these things or you start sort of describing some of these signs and symptoms, if you came to my office as a primary care provider, I would send you to audiology for further assessment. And you're saying that even there, people are not potentially getting that full spectrum assessment that they should. So can you talk one...

a little bit more about other red flags that I might have missed that I haven't mentioned, and two,

So how do we then have this conversation with an audiologist to ensure that we are getting that full spectrum of testing? There's a lot there to unpack. And I think the primary thing that we have to do is we have to say to audiologists, to dentists, to pediatricians, to otolaryngologists, do you practice in accordance with best practices by your national association? And virtually everybody wants to say yes.

But, you know, what that opens up the discussion to is, well, you know, we do what we feel we need to do. We let the signs and symptoms guide our testing protocols. And that's okay. But with hearing and vision, these are our two primary senses. And if we don't thoroughly examine them, we don't thoroughly know what's going on. So here's an interesting thing to think about with hearing and hearing loss.

When somebody has hearing loss, they have absolutely no way to know that. When you have vision loss, you can look at a newspaper and you realize you can't read it. You can look at your driver's license and realize you can't read it. You can look at your phone and you can't read it. With hearing loss, you have no way to know what you're not hearing. And if we don't test it comprehensively, nobody else knows what you're not hearing either. So I think that this is always a difficult, difficult situation because so

So much of healthcare is expensive. Getting vision tests, to getting dentistry, to getting orthopedic surgery, to getting brain surgery, everything is very expensive. So the question is, can we find a way to make sure that people who are having difficulty are availed of their diagnosis and then with their hearing care or their healthcare provider,

they can chart a path that's best for them. But it always starts with best practices because when we have best practices from any of the medical or healthcare disciplines, we know that these are very, very learned people who've looked at the literature, who've looked over the decades, if not centuries of data and said, this is what we need to do. Now to do less is sometimes more cost effective. I get that. But

I think that we have to make sure that we really have a diagnosis first and a treatment second. There's nothing new there. Diagnosis first, treatment second is always in the patient's best interest. So then talking a little bit more and digging a little bit more into the diagnosis piece of it, there are many different causes of hearing loss. Some one might consider benign. So this is not something that is going to endanger other parts of your health.

and then some that would be more concerning for potentially malignancy or other types of things. So what are some of those types of red flags or how do you sort of make a diagnosis on the spectrum of what could be causing your hearing loss? How are you making that step-by-step approach to figuring out what is underlying the hearing loss? Dr. Michael McKeown: Well,

Well, the diagnostics that we have in 2025 are very, very sophisticated. We can look at hair cells, outer hair cells, inner hair cells. We can look at the auditory nerve. We can look at the middle ear, which is the malignus incustapes, the eardrum. We can look at the ear canal, which we look at all of these components of the hearing system separately. When we are looking at the listening system, that actually involves the entire brain. For people with untreated hearing loss who are at risk,

their untreated hearing loss does tend to exacerbate cognitive decline. Now, let me give you a little bit of background on that. When we say somebody at risk, what we mean is that they probably have less education. They're probably in a lower socioeconomic group. They probably have more hearing loss. They probably have comorbidity factors, most importantly is diabetes.

And when people have these other risk factors going on and they have untreated hearing loss for eight or 10 or 12 years, they are at a higher risk of cognitive decline. And that's been shown throughout the literature for a long period of time. Most recently, the ACHIEVE study out of Johns Hopkins came out a few years ago, and they showed exactly that. People who were at the highest risk

had about a 45% increased risk of cognitive decline. And then you had the Lancet studies that came out in 2017, 2020, and 24, and they showed that about 50% of your dementia risk is due to age and deoxyribonucleic acids, your DNA. But the other 50% of your risk of cognitive decline is due to about 14 potentially modifiable risk factors, and hearing loss is consistently shown to be the number one potentially modifiable risk factor. So we've talked a little bit about

cognitive decline. But people with untreated hearing and listening problems also have a tendency towards isolation, social isolation, depression, anxiety, and of course, lack of communication. So they're not involved. And it's a very, very difficult situation because your hearing loss makes you more likely to be lonely and isolated and depressed and anxious.

It helps us sort of understand what are the consequences, the most significant sort of health consequences, physical and mental, of hearing loss. Exactly. Can you help us identify upstream of the hearing loss? What are you thinking about when someone comes to your office, you've diagnosed them and you've said, okay, yes, this person does have a certain degree of hearing loss. Are you trying to understand why?

why that is? Or is that just sort of based on the age at presentation that you're sort of like, okay, this is most likely age-related, including some of your diagnostics? Are there certain populations where you're sort of thinking about other things that might have caused the hearing loss? This is an important discussion. When we have patients who are in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, we have more of an appreciation that they've probably had tremendous noise exposure and something called presbycusis, which is just

a matter of hearing loss associated with aging. But that's not to say that young people don't have hearing loss because about 15 to 20% of children in primary education will show up on a comprehensive audiometric evaluation as having hearing loss. And children who have one ear hearing loss or an asymmetry are at a much greater risk of repeating a grade. The old pediatrician used to say, you know, that, well, if you have one good ear, you'll be fine. That turns out to not be true at all.

If you have one good ear and one bad ear in your child, you have about a 10 times greater likelihood of repeating a grade. So then once we get into the older folks in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, et cetera, we start to realize that very, very few people with hearing loss will wear hearing aids. And that has a lot to do with

with hearing aid stigma, which is very much a factor. When the FDA approved over-the-counter hearing aids, they said it was due to access and affordability as the primary drivers for over-the-counter hearing aids. And those are important drivers, absolutely. But I've always thought in my 40 years as an audiologist that the number one reason people don't seek hearing aids is nobody wants to wear them. Nobody wants to look like that guy. And I hate to say that, particularly as an audiologist, and it's a terrible thing to realize that cosmetics are such an important driver.

But then when you look at Invisalign, which is a brilliant braces alternative, you look at contact lenses, which tens of millions of people wear, you start to understand that, yeah, and you know, the way these things look has a big impact on what is selected.

So now we have some options that are not the same old form factor. When you go back to the HIA, the Hearing Industry Association statistics from 2023 and 2024, you'll see that OTC did not make a big impact. In fact, now that we have OTC, many of us anticipated that things would change dramatically. Well, they haven't.

And I think the number one reason for that is it's the same old form factor. Most often it's a hearing aid that looks like a hearing aid and people just simply don't want that. About 90% of the people with hearing loss do not wear hearing aids in the USA. And so the form factor is

is a big deal. Hidden hearing aids like invisible in the canal, those do really well. There are some hearing aids that are canal fittings, those do really well. And most of those require a custom fitting. We take a cast of your ear, we build a hearing aid into that cast, and then it's fairly cosmetically appealing. It does not show. Now there's a new form factor just approved by the FDA, January 31, 2025, which is the Nuance Audio Glasses.

And disclosure, I do work with that company. And these are fashionable glasses that have hearing aids built in that you cannot see. And so that's really an attractive alternative for many, many people because eyeglasses are thought of as being fashionable and things that people...

often seek, they want to wear them, whereas hearing aids are almost never something that one wants to wear. And I hate to admit that as an audiologist, but I'll tell you after 40 years, I don't really think that access and affordability were the main problems. I think it was the form factor.

There's research out of the 60s and 70s that show when people wear visible hearing aids, they look older by 10 years and they look less competent. And that's not a slam on the industry. The industry is brilliant and they've made incredible technical advances, but people still don't want to wear them. Your point is well taken that even with them being more accessible and available, people don't necessarily use them because they might feel stigmatized because they're wearing this hearing aid.

But are you concerned that someone might just go pick up a hearing aid, feel like, okay, I'm hearing better, but they're masking something else that might be going on? Yeah, that's exactly the point, that when you're getting an over-the-counter hearing aid that has not involved any professional input, you may be hearing louder, but you're not hearing necessarily clearer. You're not hearing better in noise. My biggest fear is that people will say, well, I tried hearing aids, they didn't work.

I have news for most people. When you try appropriate, professionally prescribed and fitted hearing aids, they will work. It's the over-the-counter stuff that is pretty good technically, but here's the thing about this. Without professional insight, it's very hard to know the expectations, how to use them, where to use them. Now with visual cheaters, when you get a pair of glasses for $10 or $15, you can just check and see that they're working for you.

With hearing aids, you can't. It's very, very challenging. And if you go to Consumer Reports in January of 2025, the over-the-counter hearing aids, they're not cheap. They run between $2,000 and $3,000 a pair versus, you know, the eyeglass hearing aids that I was talking about earlier, which are closer to about $1,100 or $1,200 a pair. Talk to us a little bit about the spectrum of intervention for assistive devices. So we started our discussion with the precursors for cochlear implants.

We've got hearing aids. Talk to us about when you choose one versus another.

This is a very important thing. Cochlear implants are only for people who are not aidable through prescription hearing aids. You do not want to go get a cochlear implant just because you're having difficulty with the television. That's not going to work out well for anybody. Cochlear implants have been FDA approved for adults since about 1986 and for children since about 1990. Preliminarily, they were only for people who were considered deaf. And what we meant by deaf was a 90 decibel hearing loss or worse.

Now you can get cochlear implants down to a moderately severe loss if you cannot recognize words. So if you can understand at least half the words in most conversations, you're not a cochlear implant candidate. Cochlear implants are brilliant. They're wonderful, moderately

My mentor, Dr. Bill House, is actually the guy who did the first ones in the history of the world in 1959, 1960. He did three of them in Los Angeles. So that was already 65 years ago. So we've had cochlear implants for a long time. But most people are not candidates. So you mentioned unilateral, so one-sided hearing loss versus someone that has equal hearing loss in both ears. So

What would be a reason for someone having just one-sided hearing loss versus someone having hearing loss equally in both ears? One-sided hearing loss can be as benign as an ear full of wax, right? It could just be that that one ear produced a lot of wax as plugging up your ear. It could also be as dangerous as a brain tumor. There are tumors called acoustic neuromas, also called vestibular schwannomas, which most often show up as hearing loss or tinnitus on just one side.

Okay, that's really helpful. So when we're thinking about interventions, we've talked a lot about hearing aids, assistive devices. Can you talk us through...

protective mechanisms? Are there things we can do to protect our hearing? And are there any other sort of lifestyle interventions that might be beneficial? The thing about preserving your hearing is it's always a personal decision. Most people will tell you they have not been exposed to a lot of noise. But I will tell you that just in an exhibit hall or an airplane, you're exposed to 85 or 90 decibels of sound all the time. I drove motorcycles for 50 years, mostly Harley-Davidson's, and they're fairly loud.

And then you have things like tractor noise, lawnmowers, wind blowers, leaf blowers, you know, hedge trimmers. All of these things are very, very loud. And, you know, you can download for free NIOSH, which is National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. You can get their sound level meter on your phone and you can check and see how loud things are. Anything over 85 decibels for more than eight hours will cause hearing loss. Those are the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health guidelines.

And so we have to be very careful to not expose ourselves to tremendously loud sounds. Music is another one. But most people will go to a music concert or a dinner concert for an hour or two. So they've got substantial exposure, but generally it's limited. I'm less worried about noise exposure due to music than I am industrial or military or homeostatic.

homeowner tool exposure. So what I do personally is I use a headset. I am a licensed handgun owner and I was also in the military 50 years ago. So I feel like I'm pretty competent with that stuff, but still I will absolutely wear hearing protection whenever I'm at the shooting range. I think it's very important for people who are exposed to significant noise all day long to get custom made hearing protectors. There's something called a musician's earplug

Again, we take a cast of your ear. They have sound filters in there, so you can still have a conversation, but it knocks out the highest and the lowest spectral responses. And that's very, very useful. That's why musicians will wear those on stage. And there's all sorts of things you can do. Even those little foamy plugs, little yellow foamy plugs, they are very effective. They often have a noise reduction rating of better than 20 decibels.

And that's very substantial, but only if they're worn correctly. And most of the time they're not worn correctly. What you have to do is roll them up very, very tight, put them deep inside your ear, not to cause pain. If it's painful, obviously don't do it, but it should go deep within your ear canal and then it should expand. And then when you notice that your own voice quality has changed,

is probably positioned correctly. It's interesting. I imagine someone who feels like they have some degree of hearing loss then to sort of wear this protective equipment that

potentially diminishes the sound quality even more may be difficult to do. Is that what you've experienced? Yeah, it's hard to wrap your arms around that when you say, well, I've already got a moderate hearing loss, so I'm not going to protect my hearing. Well, that's a bad decision because when you have hearing loss, you are more susceptible to additional hearing loss.

Give us some examples of how you might talk with your provider at your next appointment to ensure that you get the best possible assessment and treatment if you're concerned about hearing loss. You know, I think it's really important to say things like this. Dr. Smith, I can hear you just fine. However...

I have a hard time understanding in challenging listening situations. When I'm at a family gathering, when I'm in a cocktail party, when I'm at a restaurant, I cannot hear or understand what people are saying. Can you please make sure that I get a comprehensive audiometric evaluation that includes

speech and noise testing so we can see how I do in that situation. And then I'll work with the audiologist or the hearing aid dispenser to solve that problem because there are specific tools that exist in the marketplace right now to enhance your ability to understand speech and noise. But if we're just making things louder, that's not going to do it because that will make the noise louder too. That's really, really helpful. You mentioned sometimes just having a lot of earwax can cause hearing problems. What

would you suggest someone does before they even get to that appointment to really optimize their hearing? Well, as everybody in hearing health care will tell you, you should never use Q-tips. And most people, frankly, never, ever need to have their ears cleaned. You know, the best thing to do is just soap and water in the shower

and then just dry it with a washcloth. Don't stick anything in there. It's very dangerous. If you make a mistake and you hurt your ear, you can have vestibular problems for the rest of your life, meaning you can be uncontrollably dizzy. You can have a permanent hearing loss. You might need surgery to correct that hearing loss. All sorts of terrible things. You could have tinnitus for the rest of your life. And I don't say any of these things to scare people. I say them to keep you safe. Do not stick things in your ear.

Thank you so much for being with us today. This episode was full of helpful information for anyone experiencing hearing loss. Some key takeaways for me include there's a critical difference between simply perceiving sound or hearing and fully understanding it, or what we normally think of as listening. And both need to be evaluated when assessing hearing health.

The standard hearing screenings we're most familiar with only measure whether you can detect sound, not how well you understand speech, especially in noisy environments. A full audiometric evaluation provides a more accurate picture of hearing ability.

We know that hearing loss has widespread impact on our lives that goes beyond difficulty in conversation. Untreated hearing issues can increase the risk of social isolation, depression, anxiety, and even contribute to cognitive decline. And most importantly,

early and ongoing preventive steps are key. Protecting our ears from loud noise and getting comprehensive hearing tests rather than relying on quick screenings can help catch problems early and preserve our listening ability for the long term.

To find out more information about Dr. Douglas Beck and his work, make sure to check out our show notes and his website, www.douglaslbeck.com. Thank you so much for listening. Please take a moment to follow, rate, and review this podcast on your favorite listening platform.

If you'd like to send me an email about topics you're interested in or questions for future guests, please send me a note at WebMD podcast at WebMD.net. This is Dr. Neha Pathak for the WebMD Health Discovered podcast.