12/26/2023 0 Comments Diving barotrauma ear treatment![]() ![]() This is the method most divers learn: Pinch your nostrils (or close them against your mask skirt) and blow through your nose. How To Equalize All methods for equalizing your ears are simply ways to open the lower ends of your Eustachian tubes, so air can enter. Temporary, even permanent, hearing loss may result. Perilymph fluid drains from the cochlea into the middle ear. Or, if you try to equalize by blowing hard and long against pinched nostrils, you may rupture the "round window" membrane between your middle and inner ears. ![]() Suddenly, the world is spinning around you, though the sensation will probably stop when your body warms up the water in your middle ear. The sudden sensation of cold against your balance mechanism, your vestibular canals, may cause vertigo, especially if only one eardrum breaks. If you aren't so lucky-if your descent is very fast, for example-your eardrums may break. Pain subsides, replaced by a feeling of fullness in your ears which will remain for a week or more until the fluid is reabsorbed by your body. Fluid, not air, now equalizes pressure on your eardrums. If you are lucky, blood and mucus is sucked from surrounding tissues and begins to fill your middle ear. Your Eustachian tubes are now locked shut by pressure, making equalization impossible. Small blood vessels in your eardrums may expand or break, causing bruising which will last up to three weeks. Its tissues begin to tear, causing inflammation that will last up to a week. Nerve endings in your eardrum are stretched. Mucus begins to fill your Eustachian tubes, making it difficult to equalize your ears if you try. So do the "round windows" and "oval windows" between your middle and inner ears. Your eardrums bulge into your middle ears. At four feet the pressure difference increases to 1.78 psi.They flex inward and you feel pressure in your ears. At one foot below the surface Water pressure against the outside of your eardrums is 0.445 psi more than on the surface air pressure on the inside.Why You Must Equalize If you dive without equalizing your ears, you can experience painful and damaging middle-ear barotrauma. Scuba diving, however, subjects this equalization system to much greater and faster pressure changes than it's designed to handle. That's the faint "pop" or "click" you hear about every other swallow. When you swallow, your soft palate muscles pull your Eustachian tubes open, allowing air to rush from your throat to your middle ears and equalize the pressure. Oxygen is constantly absorbed by the tissues of your middle ear, lowering the air pressure in those spaces. In fact, you equalize your ears many times a day without realizing it, by swallowing. Opening the tubes, to allow higher-pressure air from your throat to enter your middle ears, normally requires a conscious act. Each has a kind of one-way valve at its lower end called the "Eustachian cushion," which prevents contaminants in your nose from migrating up to your middle ears. ![]() ![]() The key to safe equalizing is opening the normally closed Eustachian tubes. If you fail to increase the pressure in your middle ears to match the pressure in your outer and inner ears, the result is painful middle-ear barotrauma, the most common pressure-related ear injury. Your middle ears are dead air spaces, connected to the outer world only by the Eustachian tubes running to the back of your throat. Fortunately, ear injuries are preventable. From simple cases of swimmer's ear to the serious and sometimes lasting damage of barotrauma, divers are vulnerable to ear problems because the delicate mechanisms that govern our hearing and balance just aren't designed for the rapid pressure changes that result from diving. Protect the delicate inner workings of your ears with practical advice from the experts. Listen up - Those flaps on either side of your head do more than hold your sunglasses in place. ![]()
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