There were two lessons waiting in store when I was fitted for new hearing aids recently.
Let’s start with lesson one: Brands are important. Well, brands aren’t usually important to me. I’m the person who buys the store brand just so I can save a few bucks here. If there’s a sale on toilet paper, I’ll buy that brand, regardless of what brand it is. I’m a marketer’s worst nightmare.
But when it comes to hearing aids, brands can make a difference. See, different companies have different theories on what’s the best way to hear something. With one hearing aid, I can hear crickets chirping, but not human voices and footsteps. On another hearing aid, I’ll lose the crickets, but gain the human voices. It all depends on the brand and how the mini computers in the hearing aid are programmed to pick up sound. I’m not quite sure I understand it completely, but trust me — different brands of hearing aids sound, well, different.
So, when I went to the hearing aid vendor and tried two major brands of hearing aids: Phonak and Widex, not surprisingly, I found the Widex sounded better than Phonak. For the past 10 years, I’ve been hearing sounds through a Widex hearing aid, and it was just odd to switch brands. It would have meant reprogramming how my brain processes sound, with no guarantee of success. And it’s a reason why the Naida didn’t work well for me. I was switching brands.
Second lesson: The hearing test doesn’t match you up to a hearing aid. The hearing test can measure how well you hear or don’t hear. But what are you comfortable hearing? What one person feels is a comfortable audio level could be painful to another person. The body responds in ways that the hearing test can’t show. That’s where it becomes a trial and error session to find the right hearing aid that has an acceptable audio level.
Take my own ears. I have a 90-100 decibal hearing loss in both ears. That puts me in the range of having a profound hearing loss, which is near as bad as it gets without being completely deaf. But the audio range I’m comfortable hearing means I should wear a hearing aid for someone with an 70-80 decibal hearing loss, or a severe hearing loss. Turns out I just don’t want to hear things as well as I could. No wait, let me rephrase that: my body knows what it’s comfortable hearing, and by trusting that, I can trust I won’t get a hearing aid that could fry what little hearing I have left. As a result, I need a hearing aid that’s a little less powerful than what I could have.
That’s something I certainly didn’t pick up during my first attempt to get new hearing aids. I was being steered toward hearing aids that matched my hearing test, so no wonder I wasn’t having much luck at my previous hearing aid vendor.
The overall lesson: Finding a hearing aid isn’t an exact science. You need to know the products out there and know your own comfort level.
I completely agree. I have come across many people who experience a comfort level that they are accustomed to regardless of their decibel level of loss. Make no mistake: There are brands out there that rely on amplification of general noises and based on how you want it to react to them (meaning adjusting noise canceling on your specific unit combined with the amount of hearing loss unit you try), it will react to all noises of that specific frequency. Budget is also a factor, but not the know-all of end-all of a purchase. I’m glad you brought up this point because you are certainly not alone. If you want to know, I know people in my inner circle love Rexton and Siemans based on their preference. As for yourself, it is a matter of personal choice. I do hope that when the time comes for you to purchase a new aid that you will try out some other brands: You may find one that suits you even more comfortably than the Widex. Take care.
[...] into the hearing aid world again and tried again. I briefly mentioned that I went with a Widex in a past post, but I didn’t say anything about the hearing aid I [...]