Healthy Living examines the proper ear care
This week’s edition of Healthy Living looks at the intricacies of one of the smallest parts of the body and the major role it plays in our lives. We invite you to literally listen up.
Marleni Cuellar, Reporting
The ear is one of our smaller body part tasked with a very big function. It is used to capture the sounds of our environment and to send signals to our brain for interpretation. But how conscious are we of changes in our hearing? Dr. Alvin Flores is an ear, nose and throat specialist; he sees patients with a range of different ear concerns.
Dr. Alvin Flores, Ear, Nose & Throat Specialist, Surgeon
“People would usually come to me for the main symptom of pain or what we call otalgia. That would be one of the main symptoms that patient would come to me. Of course, they would also come to me with tinnitus or the ringing of the ear. They would also come with symptoms of oral fullness, that they feel blockage of the ear. Also they would come to me for vertigo, if they feel imbalanced if they feel dizzy. Those are symptoms that they come to me for.”
Dr. Flores says patients also come to him when they are concerned with their hearing. He says the problem he encounters most is that they tend to come when the problem of diminished hearing loss has been present for some time.
Dr. Alvin Flores
“The minute you are having one of these symptoms you shouldn’t wait you should come because we can avoid further complications. For example, sometimes some people say from one day to the other I am not hearing that’s an urgency or emergency because it could be that you are having an acute sudden hearing loss and if you come to me quickly I can help you but what many people do is they wait and then the problem get worse.”
He recommend coming in for a checkup, which would include a medical history, a physical examination an endoscopic evaluation and a hearing test.
Dr. Alvin Flores
“Once we have the diagnosis we need to cater to that for example if it just a blockage of wax, well we need to remove it obviously right. If it’s an external otitis, we need to treat it see what’s it causes most of the times its bacterial in origin. It could be like I told you. It could be, like I told you, fungal so we need to cater to that and treat it. For adults, like I told you, a simple thing like wax formation is a cause of hearing loss. Of course there are many other things like a traumatic event, a person had an accident, a car accident, hit his head he could have a problem of hearing loss.”
Some people who are more at risk for problems with the ear, are swimmers or people who spend a lot of time in the pool, people who work in really loud environments and even people who take hypertension and arthritis medication as the medication they take may cause hearing loss.
Dr. Alvin Flores
“Of course children and toddlers I have seen many circumstances where they put foreign bodies in their ears, beans and things like that, which needs to be treated properly because most of the times they are children that are like under the age of seven years. They will not cooperate, even less than ten years and what happen some general practitioner would do they would try to remove it and it just cause trauma to a child. So I recommend if you have a foreign body don’t try to manipulate it send it to an ear, nose, throat specialist let us do it the right way. One of the biggest prevention I tell my patients is please don’t manipulate the ear. Don’t use Q tips. One of the biggest problems I see is that we use Q-tips a lot and we provoke problems like making like a snowball in our ear and clogging up our own ear with wax. That’s one of the things that we could do for prevention; don’t use nothing to clean your ears. Don’t manipulate your ear because sometimes we even injure our external ear and cause what we call external otitis. So basically if you go swimming you could use earplugs. If you’re showering don’t let water go into your ears. People have the bad habit of letting water go into your ear or putting warm water, cold water, all kinds of things. I don’t recommend manipulating your ear. I say don’t do it. The ear have its own function and it can manage itself.”
And in the modern era of I-pods and Mp3 players, Dr. Flores suggests moderation especially in prevention of Noise-Induced hearing loss.
Dr. Alvin Flores
“Those cause what we call induced hearing loss. We provoke our own selves doing that. I do not recommend it for long times I will not say ban it completely but I would say don’t—you need to use protection. If you can avoid it, the best thing is to avoid it because in the long term you will provoke your own problem; what we call noise induced hearing loss. People that go shooting, use guns, rifles, if they do not protect themselves, they can cause traumatic problem of hearing loss; sudden hearing loss they could cause. If you go shooting Please protect yourself. Use protectors.”
If you experience discomfort in the ear, ringing even only once for the day, feelings of imbalance and dizziness, blockage, or if you find you have to listen to TV louder than others or need others to repeat things to you often, your best bet is to visit your specialist so that they can find the cause, prevent and treat.
