Learning to Adjust Hearing Aid

A person without a hearing problem may be inclined to think that a hearing aid would certainly be the obvious solution to the problem. Although a hearing aid can be helpful, it has limitations.

An expert in the field, Hayes Newby, writes: "Hearing aids are expensive instruments, and it might be expected that once a patient had invested in one he would force himself to learn to operate and adjust to it." But will he? "A large proportion of hearing aids," he continues, "end up in the proverbial dresser drawer."

Probably you know someone who has purchased a hearing aid. Perhaps the person is as close to you as your marriage partner. It may well be that he is not wearing his hearing aid. This may cause frustration for those whose hearing is not impaired. They may say, "If only he would wear his aid, we could communicate much better."

Still, there must be a reason for his not using the aid. Commenting on the problem, Hayes Newby states: "Too many patients expect that the hearing aid will be the answer to all their hearing problems, and that once they start wearing the aid they will be able to hear just as well as they did when their hearing was normal. Unfortunately, this is not true . . . a hearing aid is an amplifier system, and not a very high-fidelity one. It can serve to make speech louder for the individual, but it cannot make it any clearer."

So the first problem is with the hearing aid itself. It is limited as to the variety of sounds it can reproduce. While to some extent selectively featuring certain sounds and dampening others, the hearing aid cannot amplify these without a measure of distortion. At best, the quality of the amplification is much more like the sound of a telephone than that of a high-fidelity recording.

A second problem is that persons with hearing problems are all different. No two ears are alike; nor do they hear exactly the same. Hence, an amplification that seems too loud for one person is comfortable for someone else.

This can be illustrated in the case of individuals with "normal" hearing. Some young people may turn up the volume of a record player or radio and appear to be totally comfortable while listening. The parent, meanwhile, is stating emphatically that the music is too loud. Both parent and children may hear the same loudness, but they have different tolerance levels.

Since the hearing aid tends to amplify all sounds, what the wearer can tolerate plays a large part in the effectiveness of the aid. If he uses it at the "comfort" level rather than the "listening" level, he will not be taking full advantage of the instrument's ability to amplify sound. The hearing aid may be "on" but not "up" high enough to help him to understand speech.