Occupational medicine and specialist health and safety practice in the 21st century are changing rapidly. ‘Modern’ occupational diseases—psychological stress, non-specific musculoskeletal disorders, the subtle psycho-social interactions between motivation and perception of disability— absorb most of our time and professional energy. It is easy to forget that the workplace hazards that were fami...

At midday on 21 August 2017, Big Ben, the bell at the heart of the great clock of the Houses of Parliament in London chimed 12 times and then fell silent. If all goes to plan Big Ben will not “bong” again until 2021, allowing essential repair and conservation work to be carried out. Its silencing was controversial, attracting even the prime minister’s concern. Across the Thames, however, at St ...

Military personnel when deployed in environments characterized by high-level noise require personal hearing protection devices that may limit their auditory detection, sound localization and verbal communication capabilities. This limitation may have an impact on the successful outcome of the mission, as well as personal safety. Because of the noise and also the high incidence of hearing loss, ...

Musicians in symphony orchestras are exposed to harmful sound levels. Although research shows that industrial workers have a higher propensity to noise-induced hearing loss, musicians can also develop a hearing loss from noise exposure. Furthermore, musicians can suffer from tinnitus, hyperacusis, and distortion, among other hearing disorders, which can affect their work more severely than a he...

Otoacoustic emissions are low-intensity sounds that are produced by cochlea. The aim was to evaluate of the click evoked otoacoustic emission /TEOAE/ and distortion-product otoacoustic emission /DPOAE/ before and after shooting and compare it with conventional pure tone audiometry. Ten male soldiers /20 ears/ were exposed to impulse noise /15 single rounds of live ammunition at the maximum C-we...

The mining workforce experiences high rates of hazardous noise exposure and hearing loss. However, previous studies have identified specific behavioral and attitudinal barriers that keep miners from effectively acting to prevent their own hearing loss. The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has developed several new hearing loss prevention tools and interventions that ...

This critical sociolinguistic study explores how mining work is governed in the name of security a mine Arctic Finland. Although industry dominated by multinational corporations, mines themselves tend to be concentrated peripheries where mobile and multilingual workforce recruited. Mining high-risk business: industrial accidents environmental damage can severe. Discursive practices play crucial...

Stressful events promote activation of the sympathetic nervous system which causes measurable physiological changes in the body. Visual and auditory inputs often aid in this “fight or flight” stress response if potential harm is detected. In this study, seemingly stressful visual or auditory stimuli were presented to participants. The physiological stress response was assessed by measuring hear...

AIM: To identify how music and singing may be used therapeutically by nurses in caring for older people. METHOD: A multimethod approach was taken, comprising a search of the Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) and Medline databases, and the extraction of relevant articles from three existing reviews. FINDINGS: Two reviews and 16 research reports were identified, th...

A demandance is a psychological “pull” exerted by a stimulus. It is closely related to the theory of “affordance”. I introduce the theory of demandance, offer some motivating examples, briefly explore its psychological basis, and examine some implications of the theory. I exemplify some of the positive and negative implications of demandances for design, with special attention to young children...