There are new studies coming up though that are beginning to challenge this kind of traditional understanding about how MP3 players cause hearing damage in young people. It's not that scientists don't believe that loud noise (okay, music) can damage one's hearing. It's just that scientists don't believe that we're actually seeing any additional hearing loss among teens than before music players of any kind became popular (that would be before the Walkman).
Wait a minute, didn't the Journal of the American Medical Association just publish a study that proved that hearing loss among teens was up 5% since 1990? They did; but they didn't say it was because of the MP3 player. It was other studies all around that made the connection. In Britain, and Australia, study after study shows that young people listen to their MP3 players all day with the volume turned all the way up. The connection between this and hearing loss seems almost too obvious to even question. They keep pointing to how in some instances, earbuds, especially the ones that are designed to go right into the ear canal, can put out sound levels as loud as a jet engine.
Still, there is room for doubt. Scientists today are beginning to point to how these studies have measurement errors. Sometimes they measure hearing loss to be 10% higher than it really is. These studies that implicate MP3 players in teen hearing loss are a classic case of how the media can take up a piece of science and then try to sensationalize it.
To measure that a teen has hearing loss, these studies usually give the child in question a hearing test where an audiologist plays tones over headphones and asks the child to raise a hand if he hears anything. Those kinds of tests can bring up lots of false positives where they put down a child is having hearing loss when there is none. Equipment can be poorly calibrated, earwax buildup can account for some of it and so on.
Here's more proof that these tests can be way off. In this study that measured the hearing of members of a marching band, they found that about one out of five members had hearing loss. But they didn't just test once. When they tested repeatedly over the close of the year, they found that half the time, people made a remarkable recovery. It just goes to say that our testing methods are pretty undependable. None of these studies that blame the MP3 player for hearing loss has ever done multiple hearing tests on subjects over a course of months. They just test once and then cry Hearing Loss. That isn't fair, now is it?
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