Our usual office hours:

Tuesday: 9:OO – 4:OO
Thursday: 9:OO – 4:OO
Saturday: 9:OO – 12:OO

We often do home visits on Wednesdays or Fridays, but we can schedule office visits on those days

Ears to You

Come Home to better hearing

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It’s Okay to Cry

2016-10-20_thanks-outsidePeople react to better hearing in a wide variety of ways. Recently one of our patients came in for maintenance on a hearing aid. She brought a thank you card which expressed her appreciation and she cried as she described how precious better hearing is to her.

We don’t see that level of emotion every day, but we certainly appreciate all the cards we get. What is more common is the gentleman who has an obvious hearing loss, but who is in denial of the problem. Other people mumble. His wife turns away as she’s speaking and he doesn’t understand. It’s not his problem. I’ve probably put this next anecdote in a previous post, but it bears repeating, if only to point out how far some people will go in their denial. [Read more…]

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“Sorry, I can’t help you.”

Other than telling parents their child has permanent hearing loss, the words “sorry, I can’t help you” are the words I least like to use in the practice of audiology. Sometimes the reason is clear at the first visit. The hearing evaluation is done and I find hearing ability that is too poor to benefit from hearing aids. This may result in a referral for a cochlear implant consult. This sort of finding is quite rare.

Another pretty rare case (just had my first one in years) is the person for whom we’ve demonstrated benefit, but who gets to the end of the trial period and walks into the office with the hearing aids in the bag. I’ve done all the due diligence I can do as an audiologist. I’ve worked to discover what the patient wants to achieve. I’ve done all sorts of testing, questioning, counseling, fitting, verification, and validation. I know I’ve helped him hear better, but there’s some motive or expectation I didn’t meet. In cases like this, when I’ve done all I can do, I have to tell the patient that he may be better off at a different practice. Perhaps another audiologist can find a way that I couldn’t. I hope so. In the meantime, I’ll try to help others who want to hear better.

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Hearing Aids and Alzheimer’s: A case example

Recently a family brought in an elderly gentleman with moderate Alzheimer’s. He had been fit with hearing aids from another provider and the family was not satisfied with the service he received. The family had also been to a different provider who said they could not help him. I was able to do a minor repair and make his old aids function again. When wearing his old hearing aids he had a stooped posture and sad eyes. He made minimal eye contact, and communicated poorly. I encouraged them to bring him back for an evaluation.

Over the next month or so I was able to fit him with a new set of hearing aids that I tuned via Speech Mapping. At his first follow up I saw a different man walk into the office, a man with erect posture and smiling eyes. His ability to communicate was much improved and his family reported the same; they were delighted. Now the improved mien may have been a matter of good days vs. bad days, but his improved communication ability was not. I can’t promise the same results with every Alzheimer’s patient, but I’ll do my best.

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How loss of hearing is like loss of freedom

July 4th is a good day to write about freedom. People with normal hearing are free to hear and listen normally. We hear like we breathe, without thought or consideration. But people with hearing loss are not free to hear normally. Noise, age, disease, genetics, or drugs may have taken what was once taken for granted. Hearing loss for most people is a slow and gradual process. It doesn’t hurt. There are no dramatic sign posts along the highway of life that point to the problem. The first manifestation may be frustration and weariness at the end of the day; frustration from mishandled communication and weariness from all the efforts to understand. [Read more…]