In teenagers too… I know It because I was a teen a loooooooooong time ago…
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Hearing loss can also mimic cognitive impairment in older people (you can’t remember what someone said if you can’t hear it to begin with) and promotes social isolation which is also associated with cognitive impairment. I’ve also seen hearing loss described as a predictor of cognitive impairment (by cognitive impairment I mean both mild cognitive impairment and dementias).
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That’s the medical profession in a nutshell. They’re doing the best they can, and it’s often a hell of a lot better than an amateur (or the physicians of the past) could do, but it isn’t good in absolute terms. If you had a mechanic who knew as much about cars as the best doctors know about the human body, you wouldn’t let that guy anywhere near your car.
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Traditional landline telephony in the analog era was based on a bandwidth of 300-3000 Hz, and that does make deep voices sound a bit thin and raspy.
Anything beyond that band was rapidly rolled off, along with (in North America) a notch around 2600 Hz. The switch to digital widened the band a bit (8 kHz sampling rate), but most phones don’t really offer much frequency response beyond 3000.
Modern codecs used in cell phones offer vastly better frequency response as long as no codec conversions occur in the path.
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Hearing loss mimicking and contributing to dementia is what has happened to my dad. I think as he couldn’t hear people the effort to parse meaning became exhausting and led to him choosing to tune out, and now even if he could hear he has somehow lost some of the skill of understanding. But his reading comprehension is perfect!
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How is she going to know what to do?
Actually, my mother had this (I’m not at all sure that she would have called it a problem) but it was only my voice that she couldn’t hear.
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Suck on some helium. See if that works!
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I have gone mostly deaf in my right ear and have nasty tinnitus in it as well (which hardly seems fair) and I have trouble hearing male voices due to the low frequency. Women with higher-pitched voices are fine but soft-spoken males are the worst. Can’t hear a thing. Find it hard to believe that this is very rare.
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As someone who works in mental health with older adults (and sees and diagnoses a fair bit of demetia) I have learnt a few things I plan to use in my old age (if I am lucky enough to get old). One of those things is to get a hearing aid if hearing loss starts to impact my life. There are a lot of stubborn people (anecdotally it seems more men than women) that won’t consider a hearing aid. They are also freaking expensive which doesn’t help. “Use it or lose it” really applies to health in general for older people (and younger too I am sure).
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He’s all of our dads.
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I appreciate that this is less about the actual condition, and more about deliberately miscasting it as seventies-style Battle of the Sexes gag. But it’s dubious that “deafness at lower frequencies” == “inability to hear male voices”. It’s only the vowel sounds that are affected by gender; sibilants, plosives and other sounds cover the whole spectrum, and (at least in English) are probably more important to understanding speech.
As other posters have mentioned, chronic, subjective medical conditions often become vehicles for other things - e.g. it’s difficult to cleanly separate chronic back pain from depression, or food intolerances from eating disorders, because in the real world, diagnoses, symptoms, psychology and social factors are all tangled together. In the past, everyone knew that flat feet made you unsuited for even vaguely physical work, and doctors in London prescribed emigration to Australia for asthmatic kids, but I don’t think you’d find any trace of those things in a modern medical curriculum. Doctors’ advice is not pure science; it’s also, you know, lifestyle advice from a middle-class person who doesn’t know you that well.
This would be a case in point. We view aging in a very medicalised way, but partly it’s a matter of what you think your life is supposed to be. I’ve seen several people go into sharp mental decline after a relatively minor medical intervention, and it seems pretty clear to me that when you’re old and find yourself in a hospital ward for three days, you can easily think “welp, I’m on my last legs now, there’s no more point listening to people’s tedious bullshit / getting out of bed when I don’t feel like it / doing anything strenuous etc”, and at that point you can decline very rapidly. And you’re completely entitled to feel like that at 90 - I’m pretty much there at 40 - but I think there are cases where someone still has some gas left in the tank, and the medical industry inadvertently encourages them to focus on withering away instead.
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Did you just assume my voice’s GENDER?!
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I have a similar condition on the opposite side. What bothered me during hearing tests (and during musical performances) was feeling low frequencies. I could tell sounds were near without being able to figure out which instrument was causing them.
What helps me sometimes with soft-spoken males is lip-reading. However, I’m in a language discussion group with a man like that and discovered my ability to lip-read seems to be limited to English.
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What’s the opposite of a Darwin Award???
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I am hoping that they are much improved from when I was younger. I tried different models for years before giving up. Most of my conversations were in group settings, and at times it seemed like the crowd noise at a sporting event where everything merged into what seemed like a single roar. In places like restaurants, I could hear everyone’s conversations except the people at my table.
The amplification of electronic equipment was even worse. I worked in IT, so that was a daily hassle. The most painful headache of my life happened the day I forgot to turn my hearing aid off before walking through a secured door at the airport. Fortunately, I was traveling alone and didn’t have to explain why I suddenly started cursing and shaking my head. Fun times.
I totally misread the title as, “Woman […] cannot bear male voices.”
Which, depending upon the tone and the level of condescension, could be very understandable.
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Hearing aids still have problems with working in crowded areas. Even if those things were ironed out, your brain has to get used to interpreting the new aural information and this can take up to several weeks to achieve (a similar thing can happen with new glasses). I have met some people who are unable to continue trialling aids as they can’t abide this period.
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Surviving unspectacularly?
