Do NOT Ignore Your Hearing Loss
Did you know that 25% of Americans 65-75 and 75% of those over 75 have hearing loss to some degree? Considering those numbers, would it shock you to learn that only about 20% of those people ever buy a device that will restore some of their hearing capabilities?
Almost every patient I see in my private practice has no idea that a serious consequence of losing our hearing is that we actually lose the ability to process sounds into words. The more prolonged and severe the hearing loss, the worse the ability to process and understand words becomes. 8% of my patients have zero ability to understand words. By the time some people finally get around to addressing their hearing loss it’s often too late and they have already lost the ability to form words from incoming sounds.
The medical community at large is at fault for this, in my opinion. People with hearing loss are often not informed that as their hearing diminishes so will their ability to convert sounds into words. Because this occurs almost without exception with hearing loss patients, they should be made aware of this at the moment a hearing loss is discovered.
Of course, anyone who has found themselves in this situation would go back in time and fix the problem if they could, but sadly that’s just not an option and someone’s quality of life can go down dramatically without word recognition.
This is a problem that simply can’t be ignored.
