Her job as an audiologist involves testing people for hearing loss and determining what type and how severe it is, and how it can be treated.

Too often, Marcuz said, people assume that hearing loss is an inevitable part of growing older, something they just have to live with. But she said this isn't as true as it once was.

"You don't have to live with it," she said. "There are many wonderful things we can do now with technology that can really improve people's lives."

Marcuz said she originally got a bachelor's degree in child development at Humboldt State University. A professor there, Aimee Langlois, got her interested in speech pathology and audiology. But it wasn't until after she'd been working with children that she decided to go back to school, having encountered a lot of children enrolled in speech therapy.

She went back to school to get a masters degree in speech therapy, which is where she learned more about the field of audiology. She said "it had the perfect mix" of science and working with people.

Marcuz holds a "doctor of audiology" degree, which she said is a relatively new degree. She said her studies, at Central Michigan University, involved speech and language development, technology of hearing aids and social aspects.

"It's a very isolating disability because communication is how we stay connected to each other," she said.

She said a lot of people with hearing loss feel left out of conversations and so gradually avoid others more and more. She encourages people who suspect a friend or relative has hearing problems to approach them in "a non-confrontational way."

"I see people all the time with tension in their relationships with family members, serious tension, where this is causing turmoil in their lives," she said.

She said it used to be mainly older people who lost their hearing, except for some who have genetic hearing problems. Some people who have genetic hearing problems may have them for years before it's diagnosed, she said. Marcuz said it's now easier to test babies to find out early in life if they have hearing problems.

These days, she said, she's seeing people in their 40s with damage once common only among people in their 60s. Marcuz said hearing damage is cumulative -- as people are exposed to noise, it damages their ears over time.

"It's very insidious," she said.

Marcuz said aging does create "wear and tear on the ear" that can create problems. But she said noise exposure is another major cause, and unlike aging it's "100 percent preventable."

She recommends that people wear earplugs or earmuffs when exposed to noise, such as when using noisy equipment.

"People who are snowmobiling and jetskiing and motorcycle riding and iPod listening -- all of those things kind of chip away at people's hearing," she said.

She encouraged people to turn down the music. A rule of thumb, she said, is if you can't understand someone an arm's distance away while you're wearing your headphones, you've got the music on too loud.

While it's not necessarily "too late" for people with noise-related hearing damage, she said it's unfortunate that she sees so many of them. It can be treated, but it would be easier to prevent problems in the first place, she said.

"Don't wait until you've damaged your hearing to start protecting it," she said.

By Sara Watson Arthurs
http://www.times-standard.com/local/ci_3347138