Hearing and deafness
Hearing and deafness
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DOI：
10.1006/nbdi.2000.0343
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发表时间：
2000-10-01
影响因子：
6.1
通讯作者：
Hudspeth, AJ
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Hudspeth, AJ
在美国，大约有3000万人，即超过10%的人口，患有功能性听力损失。这包括从轻微的语言理解困难到严重的耳聋，大约有200万人受到影响。由于经济和情感原因，这种疾病对我们社会的影响是巨大的。如果将医疗诊断和治疗、听力假体和助听器、特殊教育和失去的工作潜力都考虑在内，每年的成本约为600亿美元。听力受损剥夺了幼儿获得语言的普通途径，因此也剥夺了所有形式的象征性交流。对于中年人来说，意外的急性听力损失会对心理造成毁灭性的影响，事实上比失明更严重，这似乎很奇怪，因为人类是视觉动物。海伦·凯勒（Helen Keller）也许总结了这一点，她说，失明剥夺了我们与事物的接触，但耳聋剥夺了我们与人的接触。被剥夺了听力所允许的日常社交活动的人会感到孤立。对于老年人来说，听力损失长期以来一直是家庭，朋友和工作场所疏远的根源。直到最近，老年人一直被认为是体弱，如果他们依赖助听器。
About 30 million people in the United States, more than 10% of the population, have functionally significant hearing loss. This ranges from mild difficulty in understanding speech to profound deafness, which afflicts about 2 million people. The impact of this disease on our society is enormous for both financial and emotional reasons. It costs about $60 billion a year when medical diagnosis and treatment, hearing prostheses and hearing aids, special education, and lost work potential are all considered. Impaired hearing deprives young children of an ordinary avenue for the acquisition of speech and, therefore, all forms of symbolic communication. For those of intermediate age, unexpected acute hearing loss has a devastating psychological impact, in fact moreso than blindness, which seems odd in that humans are very visual animals. Helen Keller perhaps summarized this when she said that blindness deprives us of our contact with things, but deafness deprives us of our contact with people. People deprived of that routine social engagement that hearing allows can feel isolated. For the elderly, hearing loss has long been a source of estrangement from family, friends, and the workplace. Until recently, the elderly have been considered infirm if they depended on a hearing aid.