All Hearing Aids Are Not the Same and I Can Prove It, Part 2

This is because the major component that affects word understanding for a hearing loss is the loss of high frequencies.  In the high frequency range is where the high pitched consonances are sounded out in words.  And it is the consonances that give us the meaning to most of the words in the English language.  So throw a little background noise into the mix and all that someone who has a hearing loss hears are the vowels or the base sounds in a word.  This is why the biggest complaint with our patients is, “I can hear but just can’t make out the words.”

If you don’t have a hearing loss you really can’t even fathom this because you get all the words when someone is speaking.  When you have normal hearing you also can understand words fairly well even when there is background noise or other sounds like in a restaurant full of people eating and talking.

What I did then and still do today is something I have found that almost no one else does.  I independently verified every fitting on every patient.  I used two independent means, one was Speech Mapping and the other was HINT which stands for Hearing In Noise Testing.

The results were astonishing to me.  Some of the manufactures fittings, even though it looked liked their instrument was correcting the patient’s hearing loss on their fitting software, were way off.  (Continued part 3)

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