We have entered a period of uncertainty. The COVID-19 pandemic and the Trump-era have revealed that too many fellow humans cannot easily tell fact from fiction or distinguish between scientific evidence and conspiracy theory. As a result, the media, political leaders, and those “in authority” can feed us fake news or real news, and many have difficulty recognizing the difference.
Bob Harrison is “frustrated, fed up, and completely saddened” by the lack of attention to cochlear amplification in clinical audiology.
In the history of audiology, many new ideas and methods have come and gone. Some things that were once new, are now gone and some brilliant methods to evaluate hearing, such as the Bekesy audiometry and the tone-decay test, appear to have been abandoned. I don’t know why because they were so informative.
There are many reasons why it is desirable to get drugs and perhaps genetic materials into the cochlea including prevention or reduction of cochlear damage or promotion of the re-growth of cochlear neurons.
We live in a very disturbing world where scientific evidence is sometimes called “fake news,” truth and lies are interchangeable, and a significant number of citizens believe conspiracy-theories, spread by social media. Sound familiar?
It seems like a lifetime ago that COVID-19 crept into our lives, but it was only three issues of Canadian Audiologist ago that I wrote about “The Virus and Hearing Loss.” So, what’s new?
Bob Harrison muses about how the gap between audiological science and clinical audiology has not narrowed as much as he would have liked during his (45 year) career.
With the whole world fixated on the viral epidemic, it is timely to remind ourselves about viral infections that can cause hearing loss.
Dr Bob Harrison helps hearing health professionals, audiologists be aware and be prepared to answer questions about health effects of wind turbine noise.
Bob shares his thoughts on how far we have come in recent years in our diagnosis and treatment of hearing loss in children.