Occupational Health & Safety: Wouldn't a physical injury that's 100 percent permanent—but one that's also very preventable—be worth a New Year's Day pledge to avoid? Of course it is. The injury is noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL), which is "caused by exposure to excessively loud sounds and cannot be medically or surgically corrected," according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
5 comments:
I think hearing protection is the thing I am least consistent about when it comes to working in the shop, and I think it is for a lot of the reasons in these articles. I wouldn’t make “just one cut” without eye protection, but I probably wouldn’t bother to put on hearing protection, just because the idea of a piece of wood flying into my eye is scarier than the inevitable but gradual loss of hearing that is caused by exposure to loud noises over time. Also, when I first started working in shops, I heard a lot of shop horror stories, but none of them were about hearing damage. It is easier to get a scary story stuck in my memory that makes me remember to take gloves off before sanding than it is to get me to have the same fear based on hearing loss related statistics. In the end, as this article says, the solution is just wearing hearing protection. And I know I should, I just need to keep reminding myself that it is important.
This was a good article to post about because I don't believe people take their hearing as seriously as they should. Like the article said, your hearing is pretty much the only 100% permanent damage you can do (and have control over, for the most part).I became really serious about my hearing after I suffered a bit of hearing loss in my left ear from an extremely loud EDM concert that I went to on New Years Eve a few years back. I woke up the next morning with persistent ringing in my ear (it went away over a few days) but after that instance, I knew that the warnings of hearing loss wasn't just made up by people speaking about it to scare you into being "safe," but a real and preventable incident. I am still an avid goer of concerts but I no longer attend them without bringing my ear plugs along for the ride. It might dampen the sound and the experience for me just the slightest, but I'll take that over having severe hearing damage again!
So, like others, I could be better at hearing protection, but a lot of it seems to be in either really silly or unpredictable ways. The silly ways come from situations like, I’m wearing headphones and the volume is dialed up to 11, and I do that for an hour or two, and then my ears ring after and I realize that that was kind of a stupid decision. The unpredictable ways are when you’re in the theater, and sound is doing something regarding the tuning of their system, and then all of a sudden there’s deafening feedback that you couldn’t really have prepared for unless you were privy to what the sound department was doing. Or, when you are running a show, and everyone on com has different talk volumes, so in turning your headset u to talk to one person, you blast yourself with another person. I guess my point is, there are plenty of opportunities to damage your hearing that you don’t necessarily have the power to predict, why wouldn’t you take the two seconds it takes to use hearing protection when you’re in control of the situation that might damage your hearing? It just seems like a no brainer.
I find hearing protection to be one of the best things in most situations. I remember never wearing hearing protection in high school simply because we didn’t have any form of budget for scenery, let alone providing any form of hearing protection for the crew. But now that I have access to whatever hearing protection I desire, I wear it all the time. I remember hearing last year that staple guns are the silent killer of hearing because they are interval loud noises, which won’t bother you as much as a saw running constantly, but will do just as much, if not more damage than said saw. I am also prone to migraines and have found that constant light changes (like focus calls) and repetitive loud noises (like, you know, where I work everyday) tend to set them off. And for me, wearing any form of ear protection lessens the blow and keeps me from being in any form of head pain all night.
I too could be much better at using hearing protection. Like Kim, my high school had no form of hearing protection whatsoever for many years. Unfortunately, one of my instructors discovered my senior year that he had lost a significant amount of his hearing due to shop work and exposure to loud noises. Suddenly, hearing protection became a big thing in our shop.Coming to this school was wonderful. It's almost like protection rains from the sky/shop ceiling here. I'm still not great at wearing hearing protection all the time. Sometimes I have to take it off in order to talk to someone else in a noisy environment. Other times, it's just one cut and I don't want to bother. But I'm getting better because I have to value my hearing now. It's already hard enough to understand what people say, I don't need to add more hearing problems on top of those I already have. And some sounds are too beautiful to stop hearing, like the sound of a line set moving (a gentle whoosh) or a cat's purr. I'm better off with my hearing so I might as well protect it.
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