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How much hearing loss do I have? What can a hearing aid do for me? How can
I help a loved one with hearing loss? These are all important questions
that you or a family member may face. Read the detailed answers below.
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A Word About Hearing
The terms: Severe, Moderate and Mild are limited descriptions designed to categorize your hearing loss. Many factors can influence the difficulty you may be experiencing with your hearing. For example, your environment, your personality or even your job or hobby may affect how you perceive your problems with hearing. Patients with a wide variety of hearing losses report that their hearing aids help to reduce stress and even increase their energy! (Most patients don't realize how tiring a hearing loss can be.)
- Mild: Results are just outside of the normal range of hearing (0-25 decibels). Normal hearing may show a mild hearing loss if it is impacted with earwax. People with mild hearing loss can usually understand conversation in a quiet room or environment.
- Moderate: Results show that many sounds will be difficult for your brain to process, especially if you are listening in situations that contain background noise. Sounds like S-F-TH-SH are much softer than the vowels AEIOU, so these sounds tend to be impacted the most by a moderate level of hearing loss. People with moderate hearing loss will benefit significantly from hearing aids.
- Severe-Profound: Those with severe hearing losses have difficulty with all sounds. Generally,we talk to each other at about 50-75 decibels. With a severe loss, normal conversation is perceived at very low levels. If you have severe-profound hearing loss, hearing aids are essential for awareness of environmental sounds, noise alarms and speech.
Recommendations
Our clinic chooses from a wide variety of manufacturers and models. As an independent clinic,we are not limited to any one brand or model, which means we can fit you with the right hearing instrument for your hearing loss.
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If Someone You Know Has A Hearing Problem
- Face the person and talk clearly.
- Stand where there is good lighting and low background noise.
- Speak clearly and at a reasonable speed. Do not hide your mouth, eat or chew gum.
- Use facial expressions or gestures to give useful clues.
- Reword your statement if needed.
- Be patient, stay positive and relaxed.
- Ask how you may help the listener.
- Set up meetings so that all speakers can be seen or can use a microphone.
Include the hearing-impaired person in all discussions about him or her to prevent feelings of isolation.
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What To Expect From A Hearing Aid
Improved technology helps many of our patients adapt to their hearing instruments quickly. Some patients request slight changes to their instrument's sound quality, which can be easily programmed here in our office. At Audiology Associates, we are committed to your hearing success. After your initial fitting we will contact you to arrange follow-up appointments to make sure you are getting the most from your new hearing aids.
The staff at Audiology Associates routinely performs electroacoustic analysis and listening checks of your hearing aids. This is the best method to ensure you are fit properly and to check your hearing aid(s) on a regular basis to verify their performance.
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© 2010 Audiology Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Audiology Associates serves the Portland, Oregon
and Vancouver Washington areas.
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