Gael Hannan

Gael Hannan is an author, speaker and advocate on hearing loss issues. In addition to her weekly blog at the Better Hearing Consumer, which has a passionate international following, Gael has written two acclaimed books, “The Way I Hear It: A Life with Hearing Loss”and “Hear & Beyond: Live Skillfully with Hearing Loss”, written with Shari Eberts. She is regularly invited to present her uniquely humorous and insightful work to appreciative audiences around the world. Gael has received many awards for her work that advocates for individuals to become more knowledgeable and successful at dealing with their hearing loss and a more inclusive society for them to live in.

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Hearing Loss and Career Success: Finding and Maintaining Your Path

By David Baldridge I have been researching the workplace experiences of people with hearing loss for nearly two decades. During that time, I’ve been fortunate to learn from the experiences of hundreds of amazing people. Every story is different and there are rarely easy or permanent fixes. Career success is rather a lifelong journey that hearing loss impacts every

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Speech-Body-Reading: A HoH’s Secret Skill

Don’t mess with a speechreader! This is a person with hearing loss—sometimes also known as a HoH (hard of hearing)—who secretly scans faces and body language to help them communicate. A recent article on interpreting body language by Travis Bradberry in Linkedin.com, is a fascinating look at how we interpret visual cues. In “Great Tricks for Reading People’s Body Language”, Bradberry translates

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The Fantasies of CEUs

Mike Metz takes a sharp-eyed look at the Continuing Education system for hearing health professionals. For many years, Bob Sandlin and I provided continuing education courses throughout California, bringing various “authorities” to annual meetings in order to fulfill the continuing education requirements. We followed what we thought was the intention of continuing education, even though we took advantage of

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Someone’s in the Kitchen with Tinnitus

Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah Someone’s in the kitchen I know (oh-oh-oh) Someone’s in the kitchen with Dine-AHH Making lots of noise, noise, noise! The World Health Organization (WHO) says that “excessive noise seriously harms human health and interferes with people’s daily activities at school, at work, at home and during leisure time. It can disturb sleep, cause cardiovascular

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Building Value for Case Acceptance

online pharmacy purchase provigil online generic by Howard Ong, DDS, MAGD This article is the last of a series of three, one building on the other. The first was Culture of Leadership and the second was Engagement for Alignment. The third in this series is the end result of the first two. In other words, if the principles of

Featured image for “Drinks, Dementia and Hearing Loss”

Drinks, Dementia and Hearing Loss

For those who have hearing loss and/or chronic tinnitus, news of breakthrough cures or treatments are met with a heartbeat-jump of hope. Then, a snort of suspicion. But then we think, but what if? How wonderful if one day, preferably before I die, ‘they’ discover something we can swallow or smoke that will actually revive those cochlear hair cells or eliminate chronic

Featured image for “Ethics versus Reimbursements – Part 2”

Ethics versus Reimbursements – Part 2

by Mike Metz During the early years of the American Academy of Audiology, many people took a great deal of time to compile a list of what audiology can include in its scope. Many hours of volunteer work went into what skills define the profession. Similarly, many hours went into the organization of the Code of Ethics. While

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The Hearing Loss Battle Cry

This month, at least two countries are celebrating historic independence as nations. It was a full-on revolution for the United States and a bloodless document-signing for Canadians, but for both countries, it was a years-long march to the desired freedoms. People with hearing loss also wage private wars with their disability—that can last a lifetime. Maybe a little more flag-waving would

Featured image for “Ethics versus Reimbursements-Part 1”

Ethics versus Reimbursements-Part 1

by Mike Metz A renowned and respected otologist told me over 25 years ago that if I was not billing insurers with the “unlisted procedure” code (a “by report” code for reimbursement), I was not on the leading edge of my profession. Good advice at a time when the field was moving forward. Not like these days. In a

Featured image for “When Yer Talkin’ to a HoH…”

When Yer Talkin’ to a HoH…

When people with hearing loss gather together—like 1500 of them—you’d think it would be noisy. Loud voices talking over each other, yelling what?! or pardon?! In some ways, however, we are a quieter crowd than an equivalent number of hearing people. If more than one person talks at a time, we don’t understand anybody, so we generally honor the one-speaker rule.