[TheForge] Re: Hearing aids

[Mike Spencer]

Don asked:

> ...had to purchase hearing aids and might share some thoughts and
> suggestions...the thought of spending $3000 for both ears is
> creating great emotional stress.

Don, is that US$3000 per ear?  Or US$1500 per ear?   The former seems
kinda high to me.  I going to have to go this route before long.  If I
had to meet the public regularly, I'd have had to have done it a few
years ago.

Bruce quoth:

> There's an alternative these days.  It's a box the size of a small
> box of matches and a couple earphones.  It picks up all the sounds
> around you and amplifies them.  That sounds like a hearing aid to me...

But it's not.  Or rather, it aids hearing only in the most crude (and
potentially harmful) way by boosting the amplitude of the whole
spectrum.  This is what the radio headsets do, the that ones hard of
hearing people use in movie theaters.  They make very little 
improvement in hearing dialog with music or, say, storm sounds over.


If you have hearing loss due to some mechanical defect in the middle
ear, that may be the answer.  If you have a speech discrimination
hearing loss (which usually means cochlear or so-called "nerve"
deafness) you have to boost the overall volume way too high in order
to get sufficient volume increase in the frequency bands where your
loss is great.  The excess volume can do further cochlear damage.

The high-priced aids Don is talking about are very tunable across
several frequency bands so that the ranges where you have a loss are
boosted or compensated for but the ranges where your hearing is (near)
normal are passed at lower volume.  There may be other, even more
sophisticated effects that I don't know about, such as compensating for
ambient white noise, which is a severe problem for people with speech
discrimination hearing loss.

In any event, you have to work with an audiologist who will repeatedly
adjust you new ears over a period of days or weeks until you get the
optimal performance.

There's a bookstore operator not too far from me who uses these
high-tech aids in both ears.  He's able to carry on a normal
conversation in the book store and says he can do so in a restaurant.
I can't hear well enough in a moderately noisy restaurant to have a
normal conversation.

- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^

--