Jervis Bay Hearing Centre
Call us today!
Vincentia | 02 4441 8886
​Ulladulla | 02 4455 6000
  • Who are we
  • Hearing
    • Free Hearing Checks
    • Test Your Hearing HERE NOW >
      • Adult
      • Child
    • Device Maintenance Videos
    • Tinnitus
    • Communications Training
  • Hearing Aids
    • Overview
    • Choosing Your Device
    • Assistive Listening Devices
    • Hearing Care Products
    • Hearing Funds
    • Workers Compensation
  • Cochlear Implants
  • Hearing News
    • Hearing News Blog
    • FAQS
    • Hearing Research
    • Recruitment
    • Events Photo Gallery
  • Contact Us
  • Recruitment

Cochlear Implants at the Jervis Bay Hearing Centre

27/6/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
Cochlear implants have improved the hearing of millions of people around the world. 

They are effective, long-term solutions for people with one-sided deafness or with hearing loss whose current hearing aids don't seem to be working as well as they once did.

But until recently, people who could benefit from this marvellous technology have had to travel long distances to treatment centres in Sydney, Canberra or Melbourne.

Now people living in the South Coast of NSW can have convenient access to this marvellous technology.  The Jervis Bay Hearing Centre, which has clinics conveniently situated at Vincentia and Ulladulla, now offers cochlear implant services. 
​
“We can now offer cochlear implants to our clients here in the Shoalhaven, cutting out the longer travel times and making ongoing support much closer to home,” said Alison Chiam, Director of the Jervis Bay Hearing Centre.

She made the announcement at a recent celebration to mark the Ulladulla Centre’s 6th anniversary of providing services to the southern part of the Shoalhaven. 

“No longer will our patients on the South Coast need to travel outside the region to access a complete range of hearing services and technologies,” she said.

“Many people in the Shoalhaven who are experiencing difficulties because of poor hearing, will now have new options for improved hearing,” she said.

If you would like more information about cochlear implant services, then please call or email us, or drop in to see us in person and speak to our friendly team. 
0 Comments

How music can relieve chronic pain

4/6/2016

0 Comments

 

How music can help relieve chronic pain

Don Knox, Glasgow Caledonian University

As the 17th-century English playwright William Congreve said: “Music has charms to soothe a savage breast.” It is known that listening to music can significantly enhance our health and general feelings of well-being.

An important and growing area of research concerns how music helps to mitigate pain and its negative effects. Music has been shown to reduce anxiety, fear, depression, pain-related distress and blood pressure. It has been found to lower pain-intensity levels and reduce the opioid requirements of patients with post-operative pain.

Music has helped children undergoing numerous medical and dental procedures. And it has been demonstrated to work in a variety of other clinical settings such as palliative care, paediatrics, surgery and anaesthesia.

So what makes music so effective at making us feel better? The research has often drawn on theories around how nerve impulses in the central nervous system are affected by our thought processes and emotions. Anything that distracts us from pain may reduce the extent to which we focus on it, and music may be particularly powerful in this regard. The beauty is that once we understand how music relates to pain, we have the potential to treat ourselves.

Music attracts and holds our attention and is emotionally engaging, particularly if our relationship with the piece is strong. Our favourite music is likely to have stronger positive effects than tracks we don’t like or know. Researchers have demonstrated that the music we prefer has greater positive effects on pain tolerance and perception, reduces anxiety and increases feelings of control over pain. In older people with dementia, listening to preferred music has been linked with decreasing agitated behaviour.

Alongside the benefits of listening to what you prefer, the nature of the music has also been shown to be important in enhancing how emotionally engaging it is for patients. Recent research has demonstrated this in relation to dynamics, brightness, arousal levels and other acoustic attributes. Music which is bright, with low intensity and slower tempo has been shown to have the most positive effect on the degree of pain that we experience, for example.

The pain barrier

On the back of all these insights, we are beginning to see music therapy for pain related to a wide variety of medical conditions. Types of therapy include playing musical instruments, singing and listening to music, though mostly in a clinical setting. Yet despite what we have learned and what we are now beginning to practice, there has been little work on chronic pain. This area of growing importance refers to pain either from an ongoing disease or that continues beyond the normal time that a wound usually takes to heal. This affects more than 14m people in England alone – around a quarter of the population.

To ease the burden on health professionals, the government wants sufferers to increasingly manage their pain themselves. Known as self-management in the jargon, this traditionally includes taking medication, stretching, relaxation exercises and so forth. Music has been suggested as an attractive addition to the list, given that it is inexpensive, can be tailored around the everyday activities of the individual and has few of the negative secondary effects associated with many prescription drugs. Beyond the pain itself, it also has the potential to help with persistent parts of the pain cycle such as stress and negative thoughts – particularly in this era of ubiquitous portable playing devices.

Doctors' notes? danielo

There is also much to study, however. We may know that the music we like can help with the negative symptoms of pain, but key mechanisms are still not fully understood. If being emotionally engaged with music is key to maximising our distraction in this regard, there are myriad factors affecting our emotional relationship with music that we need to understand.

These include the personal meaning and memories that the music conjures for a particular individual, the context the listener is in and factors such as age, gender, occupation and identity. There’s also a lot we don’t know about how people use music to regulate their emotions, such as using it to achieve a psychological high or to suppress negative feelings. Insights into these areas won’t only help in relation to chronic pain, but would certainly bring important benefits in that area.

Most of the research to date has been in laboratories and clinical settings – hence the reason most therapy takes place in the presence of specialists. Particularly if we are to learn how best to apply music to chronic pain, where self-management is so important, we’re going to need more research situated in everyday settings.

I am planning studies myself based around everyday music listening and how this can help support self-management of pain. Undoubtedly music therapy for chronic pain is an area with great potential, so there is every reason to others to press ahead too.

The Conversation

Don Knox, Senior audio lecturer, Glasgow Caledonian University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

0 Comments

    Archives

    April 2020
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    November 2015
    September 2015
    January 2015

    Categories

    All
    Hearing Blog
    Jervis Bay Hearing Centre
    Mollymook Ladies Golf
    Whats Up

    RSS Feed

Contact Us

Medical Referrals

Code of Conduct
Call us today!
Vincentia | 02 4441 8886
​Ulladulla | 02 4455 6000

Picture
Picture