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Show Your Doctor Says... The following is one of a series of articles written by members of the Utah State Medical Association and published in cooperation with your local newspaper. These articles are scheduled to appear every other week throughout the year in an effort to better acquaint you with problems of health, and designed to improve the well-being of the people of Utah. Surgery in Loss of Hearing There are two types of hearing loss that may be benefited by surgery. sur-gery. The most common type of hearing hear-ing loss is caused by blocking of the tube between the throat and ear by enlarged adenoid tissue. This may show up at an early age any may account for lack of adequate ade-quate progress in school. The adenoid tissue may need to be removed by surgery and may need to be followed with x-ray or radium irradiation. The second less common and more spectacular type of hearing loss is clinical otosclerosis, the cause of which is unknown. This runs in families and may miss a generation or so. This type of deafness is caused by a bony growth in the middle ear that prevents motion of the bones of the ear. On this account sounds cannot reach the inner ear. Removing Re-moving this bony growth is impossible impos-sible without causing irreparable damage, nor does any known medicine medi-cine help. Candidates for surgery must be carefully screened by an Otologist (ne who has studied the conditions condi-tions of the ear) who carefully examines the ear. nose and throat of the person, including any history his-tory of allergy. A careful examination of the he iring is then done using an I audiometer, tuning forks and both spoken and whispered voice for air conduction and an audiometric and tuning forks test for bone conduction. conduc-tion. This latter tells the condition condi-tion of the nerve of hearing. If the nerve of hearing is not in good condition for all sounds, then the expectation of hearing improvement improve-ment is scant to nil. Nor can hearing hear-ing be improved, adequately if the air conduction loss is too great. If the patient's hearing loss is within the accepted range, a physical physi-cal examination is done to see if the patient is able to withstand the surgical procedure which is somewhat formidable. If the patient is physically fit for operation, hospitalization is required. re-quired. Under either a general or basal anaesthetic the operation on the poorer-hearing ear is started by doing a radical mastoidectomy. Then a new window is made into the inner ear to replace the one blocked by bone. A skin flap is placed over the new window, through which sound waves will reach the inner ear. This prevents infection. Post operative dizziness is usually usual-ly severe enough to cause the patient unhappiness and is associated asso-ciated with nausea or vomitting. This passes and the patient is allowed to be out of bed on the third or fourth day. However, he is unsteady for days to weeks. Careful attention is reonired for the post-operative care. When the cavity is dry and the skin flap well attached there is little danger of infection and the patient may even go swimming in a. warm pool if the usual swimming requirements are met. Cold water in the ear will produce dizziness. After eight to twelve months the hearing improvement obtained is usually permanent except for the normal drop in hearing as one grows older. On well selected patients the percentage of improvement to what is called serviceable hearing is about seventv-five to eighty percent. per-cent. This means that the hearing is equal or superior to hearing by a hear aid and much more natural. |