Hearing Loss Will Never Be Cured

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]For those of you with sensory neuroral or noise induced hearing loss, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there will most likely never be a cure for sensory neural or noise induced hearing loss. And there are several evolutionary reasons for why this is the case. And I'm going to discuss the implications behind curing hearing loss and why this will most likely never happen. In a previous video, I discussed this article, hearing loss in old age isn't due to normal aging, where it showed that individuals in the isolated Maban population in Sudan exhibited basically perfect hearing into their 70s, which is contrary to the common belief that as you age, you will naturally lose your hearing. The petrus part of the temporal bone is pyramid-shaped and is wedged in at the base of the skull between the sppheninoid and occipital bones.

[00:00:50]Directed medially forward and a little upward, it presents a base, an apex, three surfaces and three angles and houses in its interior the components of the inner ear. The petrus portion is among the most basil elements of the skull and forms part of the endocranium.

[00:01:06]Petrus comes from the Latin word petrosis meaning stone-like hard. It is one of the densest bones in the body. In other mammals, it is a separate bone, the petroal bone. You can see the petrus part of the temporal bone here. It is clearly distinct in its appearance. When you think about how the human body has engineered itself through evolution, it becomes incredibly obvious that hearing is one of, if not the most important senses for survival. Your sensory organ for hearing, your cookia, is literally housed within the strongest bone in the human body. It is not meant to be messed with. And human ear hair cells were never meant to regrow in the first place. Because if you think about it, you know, our ancestors in the ice age, for example, you know, they're in the wilderness or whatever you want to call it. They're hunting for animals. They have to watch out for other predators.

[00:02:08]They need their hearing to be at the highest level possible, especially in darker environments. You don't You can't see in really dark environments, especially if there's not a lot of moonlight out, what is around you. Not having good hearing is a significant disadvantage when it comes to survival, or at least that's how it used to be.

[00:02:34]And the way the human body has evolved is such that the inner ear hair cells are not meant to regenerate because the cell division which would need to occur for inner ear hair cells to regenerate would cause a constant aging process even when no damage had occurred. Like for example, your skin is constantly undergoing cell division. your hair on your skin. It's constantly undergoing cell division to regrow itself. But this inherently limits its longevity. The inner ear is designed for perpetual longevity inherently. And there was a somewhat recent breakthrough from Harvard researchers where they had a gene therapy solution for a specific form of genetic deafness. But to actually administer this drug, they had to perform surgery which involved drilling a hole basically into the petrus part of the temporal bone which like thinking about this realistically the cookia is smaller than the size of the forehead on Lincoln's head in a penny for American viewers who can understand the reference. It's just a small coin and you're drilling a hole in the bone to administer a drug with some like microscopic needle to the cookia and somehow hoping that there's going to be no further damage associated with the administration of whatever drug and also hoping that like the temporal bone structure can be fully recovered. And it's just completely delusional to think that is the case. I would say the only scenarios where like surgical applications for hearing regeneration are are feasible would probably be in cases where people have over like 40 dB of hearing loss. And you know maybe some form of stem cell therapy could recover um enough hearing while the damage induced by the surgery would be offset enough by you know the amount recovered.

[00:04:43]But if you only have like 5 to 10 dB of hearing loss, like it's guaranteed that the surgical procedure is going to do more damage than what could be possibly recovered. And you know, even beyond the context of like how difficult that would be to achieve, I would say it's more likely that humans will figure out how to regrow completely lost limbs than regenerate hearing just because of the actual implications of what is needed to get inside the cookia to administer this drug. Like at least if you lose a limb like you still have the exposed outer skin or you know you can at least like cut off a part of the arm to you know maybe like deliver something.

[00:05:30]But it's just like beyond imagination how complicated the cookia is and the way the human body has like engineered itself. Like it's not the cookia is not meant to be with. Um it's ridiculously complex. The human body is engineered to have perfect hearing for as long as we can live. And you know before the industrial age like we did not have headphones which could play super loud or you know speakers with super loud sounds and you know airplanes, trains you know humans were not designed to be in these super loud environments. And for humans who lived in, you know, what was regular at the time like thousands of years ago in their 70s they would have had perfect hearing. I mean the only thing that could have like made their hearing worse aside from like alcohol or something would have been like their eardrum stiffening because the eardrum does technically undergo cell division. like if you damage your eardrum, it can repair itself. Um, and it will stiffen over time and this can lower the conductivity of sound waves to the cookia. But I mean that could be considered pretty negligible honestly and it's definitely not like a cause of something like tonitis where the inner ear hair cells which are damaged by loud sounds or alcohol or other autotoxic substances really cannot be repaired. So yeah, um, hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there really will not be a cure for hearing loss like some people are hoping will be the case. Um, it's just beyond imagination how complicated it is, whatever is going on inside the cookia, how you would even administer a drug to it without damaging the structures even further is beyond imagination. Um, modern science, like you know, regardless of what they say, they're not anywhere close to figuring out how to do this. Maybe in like a thousand years they'll figure it out.

[00:07:32]But yeah, right now it's just like people telling you, oh, it's like maybe 10, 20 years away. If you look through history, people have been saying this exact same thing for the past 100 years in terms of hearing. Um, realistically, they've not gotten anywhere closer to solving um sensory neural hearing loss or noise induced hearing loss on a really on the really grand scheme of things. I would say like yes, there has been improvements in research. There will always be improvements, but maybe they're like 1% of the way there, I would