Beware of over-amplification
Be careful not to have your hearing aids turned up too much and put excessive strain on your ears.
If you find yourself wincing at loud noises while wearing your hearing aids, if you start to get ringing in your ears, or if your ears hurt then you should see your audiologist and get them to test your hearing and check your volume settings.
If your aid has a manual volume control then don’t be scared to turn it down a bit when you know you will be in noisy surroundings – you don’t have to stay on the same volume all the time.
Many modern digital hearing aids will have the ability to dampen or cut out excessively loud noises and stop over-amplification occurring – if your aids don’t have a feature like this then you need to control it yourself by turning your volume control down or switching programme to something quieter.
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That’s good to know. I’m concerned because I keep my cell phone on the loudest volume setting. When someone with a strong voice calls, I have to turn it down quick! For most callers, I need it on the loud setting.
Sarah
Long rant – be warned.
I have moved this comment and made it a page in its own right as I felt that Paul raised some good points. The page is here.
I’ve read Paul’s comments. He may have a very good hearing aid and a very bad audiologist. I’ve seen all types of strange settings come into my office.
Two cheap hearing aids are better than one good one. Paul is at a disadvantage. Try placing your finger in your ear and holding a conversation and you’ll see what I mean.
yes, things should seem a bit louder you don’t want to emulate the patient’s hearing loss (normal is a hearing impairment after all), but the digital aids do have experience levels at the push of a button
Enough said for now
Rick
Rick Kirkham
Having read your “long rant” Paul, I agree with everything you said in it, especially about the hearing aid industry needing minute investigation and regulation. Here in the UK, we do have the National Health Service who will test, supply and fit hearing aids, but the old fashioned kind. If you want digital aids, you have to wait a long time. Most people need not to wait and opt for private, as I did. A very big uk company sent a rep to my house when I answered one of their ads, and after a test, I was advised to get two aids costing £5,000. I don’t know what that is in dollars, but it is I think about nearly double? I said no, off the rep went, but rang me a month later and was very nasty when I again refused to buy from her. I went instead to a firm called Specsavers and received two digital aids for £1,100 in a “buy one get one free deal”! As you say, even though my aids are manufactured by Siemens, they sound like a novelty amplifier, which is what I think, in reality. they are! I wear them at full amplification all the time – and here is my main point, for the last six months, I have been suffering from being able to hear, very loudly, the rumbling of the traffic on the main road at the end of my street, like drumming going on in my head all the time. Horrible, and it wakes me up in the middle of the night when traffic rumbles along. Thing is, for the first year of living here, without hearing aids, I was not aware of the traffic much, just a normal everyday sound if the windows were open. Now having worn aids for 18 months, I wonder if they have affected my hearing in a detrimental way? I will have to go to my doctor and make an appointment with an NHS audiology department, but for that I may wait anything up to nine months! It is time the attitude regarding deafness needs to come out of the stone age. Megan Allan – even longer rant, I’m afraid.
Paul. Open fit is only suitable for some hearing aid users. Were you certain that you had good low frequency hearing, which is the normal indication for open fit?
The marginal cost of manufacturing a mid-range hearing aid, excluding any custom ear moulds, is well below $100. The NHS get charged less than this by their wholesalers. However, the price of an aid includes a large services component, and also costs incurred from aids that were returned for credit. From the manufacturer’s point of view the big cost is the development cost, not the marginal cost, and that may have a large effect on the selling price, if relatively few are sold (which is why NHS costs are low – they can guarantee large numbers of sales).
Megan. Hearing traffic noise is normal for people with normal hearing. That is why people object so heavily to having roads built near them. In fact, aids are normally set not to restore all the sounds that people with normal hearing hear, so, for those people, everyday sounds will include a lot more that you have never heard.
Also, there is no reason to wear the aids at night, and good reasons for not doing so.
Traffic noise is mainly low frequency and it is high frequencies that cause most damage.
Finally, buying aids in your home from a national advertisement is a very good way of paying several times the realistic market price for them. The Specsavers price you quote corresponds to the lowest end of the NHS range, and do represent realistic market prices in the UK.
The NHS now has service level agreements that would not allow a wait of nine months, although you can still expect quite a long wait.