The Centre for Trauma Studies and Healing: Cochlear Implants or Sign Language - an informed choice and decision that can and should only be made by those, who live with it, By Sigrid Countess von Galen

Thursday, August 31, 2017

Cochlear Implants or Sign Language - an informed choice and decision that can and should only be made by those, who live with it, By Sigrid Countess von Galen

Cochlear Implants or Sign Language - an informed choice and decision that can and should only be made by those, who live with it,

By Sigrid Countess von Galen

I am one of those people, who hatdly watch television, as I am to busy with life itself but recently, during the holidays, I was glad that I did, as I came across a series called 'Switched at birth' that spans over a few years. Two teenage girls, one deaf - after meningitis at the age of three, the other hearing, find out that they had been switched at birth by mistake.

Of course, the programme works with clichees, too, but also captures the teenage and parent realities of different social backgrounds, now patched together in this series.

I was captivated by the openness of the various approaches, where in various stages, one deaf parent decided to have a cochlear implant but the mother and her son saw it as a betrayal of their culture as deaf people with their own language and ways of life.

There are many ways to communicate with each other rather than to coexist and it was good to see that many scenarios were taken into account and acted out, including to swap roles.

In my work with speaking people and deaf people, who speak I have come across many new approaches that came through every single unique human being's own way of living and communicating. Hearing people often have even in normal acoustic conditions and scenarios problems adjusting to others, never mind to listen and slow down, when they speak, so that even hearing people can digest, what they say.

A life in inner ear silence and sign language is for the deaf community largely a purposeful decision, simply recognising and accepting gracefully their otherness. Deaf speakers can have amazing capacities also to not just speak but also to sing in the range of frequencies that the singer picks up from the vibrations in the body.

There is low to moderate quality evidence that when CIs are implanted in both ears at the same time, they improve hearing in noisy places for people with severe loss of hearing. There is some evidence that implanting CIs to improve hearing, may also improve tinnitus but there is some risk that it may cause people who never had tinnitus to get it.

There is also controversy around the devices; the strongest objection to cochlear implants has come from the Deaf community itself, as to many in the deaf community, cochlear implants are a threat to their culture, which as some view it, is a minority with its own language threatened by the hearing majority.

More and more hearing people enrol in sign language or pick it up in the situation or from the internet, and thus become part of a new community that was long negelcted and ignored by the hearing community. It is time to change attitudes!

Heari

Edit

The first cochlear implant was invented by Dr. William House in 1961. In 1964, Blair Simmons and Robert J. White implanted a six channel electrode in a patient's cochlea at Stanford University.

The modern multichannel cochlear implant was independently developed and commercialized by Graeme Clark from Australia and Ingeborg and Erwin Hochmair's first implanted in a person in December 1977 and Clark's in August 1978.