How We Treat Hearing Loss
A full hearing evaluation includes physical examination of your ears, a consultation with you and if possible your family members, and a computerized hearing test. A physical exam can rule out short term hearing issues such as an ear infection, or other conditions that may need to be evaluated by an ENT. Your answers during consultation help us understand how long your hearing has been affected, if it is worsening, what situations give you the most trouble, and more. Then, a computerized hearing test shows how hearing aids should selected and programmed to respond.
We also want to understand factors in your lifestyle to determine which style of hearing aids would be most appropriate. For example, are you home all day, or do you work outside the home? If you have arthritis, are rechargeable hearing aids a better choice than one with small, replaceable batteries? Which type of hearing aid is easiest for you to put on? Are you a smartphone user, and would a hearing aid with smartphone wireless connectivity help?
Once we decide together which hearing aids would work best for you, we can do a fitting. We take an exact mold of your ear canal with soft, non-stick silicone, which is then used to create a custom earpiece for some styles of hearing aids. A comfortable hearing aid can be worn all day, and does not have gaps which may cause whistling.
The purpose of hearing aids is to reduce the stress in listening, and allow you to engage with people around you more easily. When your fitted hearing aids are ready, we will usually start with them programmed at a percentage of your prescription. This keeps your brain from overloading with new sounds – and you’ll definitely be noticing many more sounds right away.
A period of adjustments is typically needed over several weeks, tuning programming to best help you in the environments you spend time in. Many digital hearing aids have downloadable logs we can read electronically to understand how they are responding. As your cognition improves over weeks and months, your prescription can be turned up until you are at full hearing again.