It is often said that music has magical powers. A new study in Japan shows that allowing patients who are deaf in one ear due to sudden deafness to listen to classical music can help restore hearing or improve symptoms. Sudden deafness is a sudden, unexplained sensorineural hearing loss that is characterized by unilateral hearing loss and can be accompanied by tinnitus, a feeling of ear congestion, vertigo, nausea and vomiting. Sudden deafness occurs in 3 out of every 10,000 people in Japan each year, and the incidence tends to increase. At present, sudden deafness is mainly treated with steroid drugs, but 20% to 30% of patients still do not recover their hearing. Experts at the Institute of Physiology, Japan’s Natural Science Research Institute, wrote in a new issue of the British journal Scientific Reports that they divided about 50 patients with new-onset sudden deafness into two groups, with one group receiving steroid treatment and the other group receiving steroid treatment in addition to blocking the normal ear, listening to classical music for about six hours a day with the deaf ear, and trying to listen to the sounds of everyday life with the deaf ear. sounds of everyday life. When surveyed 10 days after this trial, the researchers found that the hearing difference between the classical music group’s ears, which had previously been 25 decibels, had been reduced to about 7 decibels, while the steroid-only group still had a hearing difference of 15 decibels in both ears. The therapy of listening to classical music is simple and easy to implement. The team believes that this finding will help develop new treatments for sudden deafness that are inexpensive and have few side effects.