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A woman woke up one day and suddenly couldn’t hear men’s voices

The woman was diagnosed with a rare ear condition that only one in 12,000 people around the world usually experience.

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Neha B.

By  Neha B.
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Representative Image Source: Pexels – Photo credit: Photo by Kevin Malik

In a scene that looks straight out of a mystery thriller, a woman in Xiamen, China, one day woke up in a hospital, only to find that she couldn’t hear her boyfriend’s voice anymore. Not just her boyfriend’s voice, but she couldn’t hear any male voice altogether. What shocked her even more was the fact that she could still hear women’s voices quite normally. Later, she was diagnosed with a rare ear condition called “Reverse Slope Hearing Loss (RSHL),” reported Daily Mail.

Representative Image Source: Pexels | Mart Production
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Mart Production

Identified only with the surname “Chen,” the woman revealed that on the night before the said morning, she heard a bizarre ringing sound in her ears and also felt nausea. When she couldn’t hear her boyfriend’s voice, she visited an ear, nose, and throat specialist at Qianpu Hospital where she was told that she was suffering from this rare ailment. Dr. Lin Xiaoqing, the woman doctor who treated her, said Chen was able to hear her when she spoke but couldn’t hear a male. “She couldn’t hear him at all,” said Dr. Xiaoqing.

via GIPHY

RSHL refers to an ear disorder in which a person’s ability to hear low-frequency sounds is debilitated. According to AanviiHearing, these low-pitched sounds can include men’s voices, bass tones in music, and rumbling sounds like thunder. On an audiogram, a graph that audiologists use to measure hearing levels, RSHL appears as a downward slope from low to high frequencies. Low-frequency hearing loss is rarer than high-frequency hearing loss, which displays an upward slope in the audiogram. According to Audiology & Hearing, for every 12,000 cases of hearing loss, only one person has RSHL.

via GIPHY

Usually, a person hears a sound when sound waves enter the outer ear and travel through a narrow passageway called the ear canal, which leads to the eardrum, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Communications Disorders (NIDCD). Then the eardrum vibrates and sends these vibrations to three tiny bones in the middle ear named malleus, incus, and stapes. After amplifying these sound vibrations, these bones pass them on to the cochlea, a snail or spiral-shaped structure filled with fluid, in the inner ear.

Image Source: National Institute on Deafness and Communications Disorders (NIDCD)
Image Source: National Institute on Deafness and Communications Disorders (NIDCD)

As the vibrations reach the cochlea, the fluid inside it stirs, causing ripples. These ripples cause the hair cells to move up and down. This triggers chemical reactions, prompting electrical signals that go to the brain and inform it about the sound, that the person hears. Therefore, the frequency of hearing loss depends on which part of a person’s ear is affected.

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caption=”Representative Image Source: ‘Delicate Mechanism of the Ear’, c1934. From The Treasury of Knowledge. [Richard Clay & Sons, Ltd., Bungay, Suffolk, 1934] (Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images)” photo_credit=”” title=””]

Speaking to Business Insider, Patricia Johnson, a doctor of audiology, explained that mainly, there are three causes for RSHL. First, “a particular gene might cause certain hair cells to never develop in utero,” Johnson said. These tiny hairs are crucial for a person to recognize different sound pitches. Secondly, RSHL may also be the result of another ear condition, like Meniere’s disease, which affects the fluid surrounding the hair cells, Johnson added. Apart from this, the condition could be triggered abruptly, as in Chen’s case, most probably due to a viral infection. However, Chen’s RSHL, doctors believe, was caused by stress, overwork, and lack of sleep. They also confirmed that recovery was possible in her case. 

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    If you own a smartphone and aren’t addicted to it, I sincerely salute you from afar. It’s so easy to grow obsessed with the passive dopamine rush of browsing internet headlines and scrolling our social feeds.

    In any brief moment of everyday silence—sitting in the dentist’s waiting room, riding in the passenger seat during an argument with my wife, even waiting for commercials to end during a TV show—I find my hand unconsciously reaching for my pocket. That feels…not normal, and I often think about the effect it must have on my relationships with friends and family. It’s not like magically rewinding the clock to the dial-up era would fix everything, but maybe certain situations call for leaving our phones undisturbed.

    Actor Aaron Paul, best known as the co-star of the acclaimed series Breaking Bad, explored this subject during a recent video interview with The Wall Street Journal. Paul recalls that he was checking his email via iPhone when his daughter excitedly entered the room—and their interaction (or, at least initially, lack thereof) led him to make a profound personal change.

    “I wanna say I’m sorry”

    “I try not to use my phone in front of my kids,” he said. “My daughter comes running in, and she’s asking me a question, something, and I’m trying to just finish this quick email. And then she stopped asking, and she kind of went and started playing. And she’s 7 [now]—this is when she was 6. And I put my phone down and I went to her. And I go, ‘You know, I wanna say I’m sorry for not being responsive to you…I wanna make a pact with you right now. I wanna promise daddy’s not gonna be on his phone when he’s with you anymore.’”

    Her “one-word response” wound up leveling him. “She looks at me and she goes, ‘Really?‘ You know, just, ‘really?‘” he recalled. “And it broke my heart, you know what I mean? It really did break my heart. I go, ‘I promise you I won’t.’ And she just jumped up and threw her arms around me like she won the biggest prize. We owe it to our kids to at least give it a shot…[With] technology as a whole, you can choose whether the technology controls you. You should control the technology.”

    Can smartphone usage impact parent-child relationships?

    It appears there’s some data to support these ideas. Robin Nabi, a professor of communication at UC Santa Barbara, led a study analyzing how parents’ various media usage—including smartphones—can impact the “emotional intelligence” of their children. The findings suggested there’s a link.

    “We know that how parents express, reflect, and talk about emotions with children influences their EI (emotional intelligence) development,” she said in 2023. “And we know how easy it is for parents to be absorbed in their own phones, which could limit the interaction and feedback they give to their children. So we thought it would be important to see what role parents’ screen time and phone use around their child might play in their child’s EI development.”

    The research, which involved 400 parents of children between the ages of 5 and 12, found that “parental use of cell phones” around their kids was the only activity associated with “lower child emotional intelligence.” Nabi noted, “Kids respond to their parents. And no matter what type of content a parent may be viewing on their phone, the outward appearance to the child is a lack of responsiveness.”

    Keep Reading →

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