When hearing loss results from kissing

You'd normally think of kissing and personal injury being related in the sense of having a graze or a bruise kissed better, but a young woman in China was in the news this month when a kiss managed to cause her hearing loss.

In case that gives the impression of the boyfriend having gotten confused about where a passionate kiss is supposed to happen, it's probably worth stating that it was a mouth-to-mouth kiss that was at the centre of the accident. A doctor from the hospital that treated the injured girl explained that "The kiss reduced pressure in the mouth, pulled the eardrum out and caused the breakdown of the ear," which sounds nasty.

If that leaves you with fear of hearing loss, don't worry too much; her hearing is expecting to return to normal over the next couple of months. The girl's local paper has written "While kissing is normally very safe, doctors advise people to proceed with caution," but it is hard to tell in translation whether there's a mischievous note of deadpan humour in that. I think there might be.

It's not the only case of a kiss causing personal injury, as I look into it. There are examples of people who have tried to kiss their dogs suffering a nasty dog bite on the face - sometimes on the lips. The resulting wounds can be tricky to treat, and - as it's likely to be your own dog if you're trying to kiss it - difficult to mount a compensation claim over. Of course, if it's someone else's dog, and there's a good reason why kissing the beastie wasn't a strange thing to do, you may be able to make that claim after all.

It's not even the only case of a kiss causing an auditory injury. There's a case, for example, of a woman who was startled to receive a kiss from her 4-year-old daughter, right on the inside of her ear (the External Auditory Meatus, or EAM), and which left her which the symptoms of an acoustic shock injury.

In that case, the woman reported complete hearing loss in one ear immediately following the incident. Over the following year the symptoms of tinnitus, ear pain and twitching near the affected ear were reported, as would be expected in an acoustic shock case, despite the noise of a toddler's kiss being quieter than this diagnosis would normally expect. It was suggested that, again, the slight suction may have contributed to the recipient's condition.

I know a little about suction myself, having had - briefly - a girlfriend who liked to suck on my lower lip while kissing; depending on how hard she sucked, it varied between "not unpleasant" and "ow!". For all our compatibility in terms of personality, our osculatory styles were just too different for the relationship to survive. Or get started. Fortunately, this never led to hearing loss, although occasionally a swollen lower lip would leave me with a degree of speaking loss.

Can I claim?