Quiet gifts for the holiday season
by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
Photo credit: Miguel Á. Padriñán
It’s the holiday gift-giving season, kicking off with Hanukkah and Christmas, followed by Kwanzaa and Greek Orthodox Christmas. As I wrote in an op-ed piece in The Los Angeles Times over a decade ago, for most middle- and upper-income Americans, holiday gift-giving approaches the Pacific Northwest Indigenous Peoples’ tradition of Potlatch. Potlatch was a festival in which the tribal leader gave away most or all of his possessions to show how rich and powerful he was.
Today, many Americans need little, and give family members and friends books they won’t read, sweaters that don’t fit or what a friend calls “dustables” to clutter up shelves. In my op-ed, I recommended giving handmade gifts, ideally food items, and saving the store-bought items or checks for those truly in need. However, spurred by the gift of a quiet shop vacuum from our youngest son, I think there is a gift category that almost all Americans need, with price points ranging from “stocking-stuffer” to a few hundred dollars.
What am I thinking of? Quiet products or hearing protection products. I received a quieter shop vacuum, producing sounds of only 73 A-weighted* decibels (dBA) and that costs around $100. But you don’t need to spend that much. Industrial-strength corded earplugs with a noise reduction rating** of 27 dBA cost under $2 if purchased in bulk online or about $3 in a handy plastic case at a big-box store. Excellent earmuff hearing protection with noise reduction ratings of 17-22 dBA are in the $15-20 range, as are earmuff bands for babies and earmuff hearing protection for older children. Noise-cancelling headphones range from $50 to $400.
You can inform the recipient of hearing protection devices that hearing loss isn’t part of normal aging but largely represents noise-induced hearing loss in older people. If it sounds loud, it’s too loud and they should turn down the volume, leave the noisy environment, or use the hearing protection you just gave them. This way, they probably won’t need hearing aids when they get old.
Happy holidays and best wishes for a peaceful, prosperous, healthy and quiet New Year!
*A-weighting adjusts sound measurements to approximate the frequencies heard in human speech. It is commonly used in occupational safety and health, because the compensable workplace injury is the loss of the ability to hear speech. A-weighting is inappropriate for machine or mechanical noise. My new vacuum was not quieter using C-weighting, which includes low-frequency noise.
**The Noise Reduction Rating is a measure of how effective hearing protection devices are in reducing the noise reaching the ear drum.