Too few doctors look upon excessive everyday noise exposure as undesirable. An editorial in the issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association for September 23, 1968, poked fun at the National Noise Study of the Public Health Service, inanely making it seem that PHS was too concerned about something that only involved a small group of industrial workers. As for the rest of the population, the editorial believed that man's ears can take it, as they always have. Some idea of the nature of this shocking piece of medical irresponsibility is found in its concluding two sentences: "The noises of the cities are the featherbeds of comfort, and noise pollution is nothing but pollution with excessive people. The quality of noise needs improvement, some think, but the quantity is only reasonable."
This type of thinking limits the health argument to industrial hearing loss. In practice there is more likelihood for political action if noise were to be recognized as a general threat to health and to the environment.