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Tiny, in-the-ear hearing aids look the best and are neatest. I have big, bulky, behind-the-ear hearing aids, and they come off every time I take my ask off, and tangle in the mask strings — a constant hassle. But behind-the-ear hearing aids last longer than in-the-ear types. The chip in the casing behind the ear is in a less harsh environment than the chip of an in-the-ear unit. Your ear is sweaty and moist, and the electronics contained inside in-the-ear devices take a beating.
Wax plugging is also much more frequent for in-the-ear hearing aids. Hearing aids have a hole in the end of the plastic ear piece, both for behind-the-ear and in-the-ear. An unprotected hole would plug with wax and be impossible to clean. Attempts to remove wax from the hole would push the wax in further, packing it tighter. When wax plugs the hole to the speaker, the hearing aids stop working and are useless. They become ear plugs.
The solution is to protect the hole with tiny vented plastic cups. The tiny holes in the cup allow you to hear the speaker. The holes will eventually plug with wax. You simply remove the plugged cup and replace it with a new one. This is the same for both inside and behind hearing aids.
The difference I found was that the tiny, inside-the-ear hearing aids sit deeper in your ear canal, closer to the wax in your ears, so they wind up getting plugged with wax frequently, requiring very frequent changes to the plastic cups. I kept running pot and having to remember to buy more. The earpieces for my current behind-the-ear hearing aids sit shallowly in my ear and They very rarely plug with wax.
There is no “right” model of hearing aids, inside or behind. There are just pros and cons. If it is necessary or very important that nobody sees your hearing aids, then it may well be worth the cons of owning inside-the-ear hearing aids. The
In my case, I must wear behind-the-ear devices. My hearing loss is so severe, the tiny little batteries that fit inside-the-ear hearing aids don’t generate enough power to correct my extreme hearing loss. I have to wear bigger, bulkier behind-the-ear hearing aids to correct my extreme loss. If you have moderate hearing loss, then an inside-the-ear model will work just fine.
Yeah, cheap ones don’t work. Ones that claim to be high performing but don’t cost like high-performing units, don’t work either. First rate, high quality digital programmables in the $5k to $7 range, are game changers for those of us with moderate to severe hearing loss.
Back in the 90's my father kept screwing with his and you could hear them buzzing.
The CD warriors will help you based on their personal experience like IgorBlevin generously explained.
A general knowledge article by John Hopkins Medicine to start.
The takeaway: the complexity, a possible inconvenience and expense should not deter anyone from pursuing the hearing correction/improvement with the hearing aids. A lot of technological progress is made in this area.
Not wearing aids when one is losing their hearing strongly tied to dementia...
One could schedule a precise diagnostic test with John Hopkins before committing to a particular aids. Diagnosis is extremely important for the right hearing aids
Last edited by L00k4ward; 04-30-2021 at 06:31 AM..
I think part of the reason why hearing aids aren't covered by insurance, is because of the lobby of deaf Americans who reject the notion that hearing loss is a disability that needs to be treated at all.
While I applaud the deaf for learning a language to accommodate them, and learning how to live in a world of sound without being able to interpret it...
I feel there are too many people who are being left out as a result. Those of us who are not deaf, but ARE hearing impaired. We hear, but we can't distinguish sounds. The world is very noisy to us, and we need to be able to filter it more efficiently. We don't want to NOT hear. But we have trouble hearing the way we do.
To us, our hearing disability is, in fact, a disibility. But the more people fight against that label, the easier it is for insurance companies to refuse to cover its treatment.
How well hearing aids can help people can come down to what type of hearing issue they have. One issue that many have is how well can hearing aids help in noisy places? I've read where people say their hearing aids can amplify too much background noises making it difficult to understand the people they're talking to.
I think part of the reason why hearing aids aren't covered by insurance, is because of the lobby of deaf Americans who reject the notion that hearing loss is a disability that needs to be treated at all.
When the day comes when most hearing loss can be cured medically I'll be curious to see how those deaf people respond to it? I think adults who are deaf can stay deaf if they choose to. But all deaf children should get treated. All children should have good hearing if possible.
When the day comes when most hearing loss can be cured medically I'll be curious to see how those deaf people respond to it? I think adults who are deaf can stay deaf if they choose to. But all deaf children should get treated. All children should have good hearing if possible.
Most hearing loss is not a disease or illness. Your assumption is similar to assuming someone can be cured of a broken leg, or a missing eye. The broken bone will heal. It isn't an illness that gets cured. A missing eye won't regrow, no matter what you try to do.
Hearing loss can't be "cured." Cochlear implants DO provide hearing for some deaf people for whom hearing aids are useless. But the hearing isn't perfect, and it isn't a "cure" for deafness. Their ears are still incapable of providing hearing for the deaf person; they're using an artificial device to provide the hearing for them.
The "deaf culture" deaf folks don't consider these treatments valid, because they don't have any problem with being deaf. They have a language and can communicate just fine with others who know the same language. They don't consider themselves disabled and fight against anyone who tries to categorize them as such.
And that's great for them, however it is not great for us who consider our hearing loss to be a disability. It's not even considered an automatic qualification for Medicaid/Social Security disability coverage.
Look into the research on hair cell regeneration in relation to hearing loss or check out the link I posted.
I checked an actual research article (rather than a science magazine's article ABOUT a research article). The tl;dr summary at the end is pretty clear:
Quote:
Unlike many lower vertebrate species [11,90], mammals are unable to regenerate hair cells (reviewed in [10]) and appear to have a reduced capacity for intracellular repair of hair bundle damage [22]. Some mechanisms by which mammalian hair cells are maintained and repair minor damage have been described [22,23,27] and were discussed in this review. These mechanisms are likely essential for preserving hearing function in mammals, but much remains unknown (see Outstanding Questions). Recovery of tip links and the actin core provides a clear example of a possible contributing factor to the recovery from temporary threshold shift, while inefficient repair of hair bundle damage, such as F-actin core depolymerization, or the death of hair cells likely cause progressive and permanent hearing loss. Characterizing these maintenance and repair mechanisms will be important for the development of therapies for various forms of hearing loss.
The above link is the source of the actual research article written by the researcher.
In addition, not all hearing loss is the result of hair cell damage/breakage. Mine is nerve damage, and it's genetic, and I was born with it, and it's progressive. There is no "cure" for this deafness, there is only prosthetic substitution (in the form of hearing aids for me and millions of people around the world, cochlear implants for others).
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