As Kansas City concert season starts, protect your hearing — and heal | Opinion
Summertime is full of music festivals and outdoor concerts that bring everyone together to enjoy good tunes. Whether you are into rising stars like Benson Boone coming to the T-Mobile Center, perennial favorites like Paul Simon at Starlight Theater or the local flavor of 816 Day, there is something in Kansas City for everybody. Even Deaf people enjoy the vibrations from music, as we recently learned at the Museum of Deaf History, Arts and Culture.
The music you listen to may lift your spirits, motivate you to go a little further on your morning run, or stir up memories from back in the day like in that Kenny Chesney song, “I Go Back.” All these benefits of music lead many people to believe that music is therapeutic, and those people wouldn’t be wrong. The field of music therapy uses music — listening, singing or playing instruments — in many settings including hospitals, assisted living facilities and correctional settings to help people manage stress, reduce anxiety and pain, and express emotions in more appropriate ways.
Many other fields from audiology to zoology use music to help people (and animals too). At the University of Kansas School of Health Professions, research is being done with cowbells (I need more cowbell!”) to help people relearn rhythmic movements that can be disrupted when they get a concussion. Parkinson’s disease can also disrupt muscle movements, including in the muscles used to speak, making the new Parkinson’s choir — the Tremble Clefs of Kansas City — a great opportunity to improve the strength of one’s voice while making new friends. Choral singing is also used by speech pathologists to help people who stutter speak more fluently.
But you don’t need to sing or play an instrument to enjoy the benefits of music. Just listening to music has many benefits as well. Listening to music reduces anxiety and depression in people with dementia, and might also delay the onset of dementia. An investment by the state of Kansas in the Kansas Brain Health Assessment Network may help us learn more about other factors that are related to dementia.
One factor related to the onset of dementia that might surprise you is hearing loss. Some research suggests that hearing loss makes interacting with other people more challenging — think of all the background noise at a diner while you’re having breakfast with someone and trying to chat. Because such noisy situations make hearing conversations more difficult, people with hearing loss may not have as many fun breakfasts as they used to, and that smaller social network might contribute to the onset of dementia.
In addition to the social aspects of hearing loss, more recent research suggests that people who started wearing hearing aids showed an improvement in their hearing abilities, as you’d expect. Surprisingly, they also showed improvements in their cognitive abilities as well. A recent report by The Lancet suggested that to reduce the risks of dementia we should “make hearing aids accessible for people with hearing loss and decrease harmful noise exposure to reduce hearing loss.”
Given this link between hearing loss and dementia, it might be a good idea to wear some earplugs at those summer music festivals so that you don’t damage your hearing from listening to loud sounds for a long time. You might consider wearing earplugs when you mow the lawn, too. Protecting your hearing now may mean protecting yourself against dementia in the future.
With May being National Speech-Language-Hearing Month, now might be a good time to get your hearing checked. You wouldn’t want to miss out on the other sounds of summer like children laughing, the pitter-patter of rain on your roof, and the buzz of a pesky mosquito, would you?
Michael S. Vitevitch is a professor in the Speech-Language-Hearing Department at the University of Kansas. Emma G. Whitney is a graduate of Olathe Northwest High School, and is pursuing a master’s degree in speech language pathology at the University of Kansas.