Rare Condition: Woman Can’t Hear Male Voices

I can hear people thinking now...wow, that might actually come in handy!  But imagine the surprise a woman in China felt when all of a sudden she was not longer able to hear the voice of males. Newsweek reported that the woman suddenly developed the unusual condition and was taken to the hospital.

At the hospital, she was treated by a female doctor who noticed that while she was able to hear the female doctors voice, she couldn't hear the voice of a male patient close by.

Although rare this is an actual condition called "reverse-slope hearing loss"  and it is so named because its shape on an audiogram is the reverse of ski-slope hearing loss. In this type of hearing loss, the low frequencies are affected far more than the higher ones. For every 12,000 cases of hearing loss, only one person has RSHL.

The condition is usually treated with hearing aides adjusted to focus on the frequency loss however, many of the people with the condition learn to cope by other means like lip reading.