Reaching happiness may require working through some unexpected problems that occur during your fitting process.
Here’s a summary of the many aspects of your fitting that must be attended to for you to be able to enjoy and benefit from your hearing aids. If any of these are causing you difficulty, we need to work together to get beyond the problem.
Physical Comfort
Your aid must be physically comfortable to wear throughout the day, in your ear canal, in the bowl of your outer ear, and also behind and above your ear if you have this type.
Speech Sounds
The main goal of your fitting is to make the sounds of speech audible and comfortable for you. We start by setting the aid to match what most people with your hearing ability would need to hear effectively. However, there is a wide variation in the dynamics of hearing for people who have similar audiograms. Your hearing loss is unique to you, and may be quite different from the average. We need to discover how well our usual prescription matches your unique hearing loss, and make adjustments to your aid as you become more familiar with the sound it provides.
Loud Sounds
Your aid compresses the wide range of sounds into a narrower range matching your hearing loss. It also has a “limiter” to prevent loud and even very loud sounds from becoming too loud and hurting your ears. If you find that loud sounds are too loud, we need to give you more protection by adjusting the limiter for sounds at certain pitches.
Your Own Voice
Your voice should sound comfortable while you wear your aid. If it sounds too loud or hollow, or seems to echo when you speak, the aid may be trapping the sound within your ear. This is called the occlusion effect, and can sometimes be improved by adjusting the sound of the aid, but usually means that we need to change something about the shape of the aid or earmold in your ear. If the effect is severe, we may need to switch to a completely different shape of aid to avoid this problem.
Feedback
If too much high-pitched sound escapes from your ear and reaches your hearing aid’s microphone, it will cause an annoying ringing or squealing sound that we call feedback. This is the same effect that happens in an auditorium if the microphone is brought too close to the speaker. Most new aids have automatic feedback cancelling circuits, but even so, adjustments may need to be made to the hearing aid settings, the venting or the physical fit of the aid (or mold) in your ear. Feedback can be avoided.
Speech in Noise
You should be able to wear aid in noisy places and understand speech more easily than you could without it. Also, the noise should be comfortably tolerable and not overly annoying. If you find yourself removing it when listening in noisy places, it probably needs to be adjusted to a more helpful setting or program.
Cosmetic Appeal
Hopefully, you will be able to choose a style of hearing aid that suits you and that you like (as you would select frames for eyeglasses). The trial period is intended to be the time for working together to ensure that all of these issues are addressed.
Are you happy with your hearing aids or is there anything we can do to enhance your experience?
Our audiologists can answer any of your questions or concerns.
