Bob Martin

Manufacturers build a lot of “help” for us into their hearing aid fitting software. This includes many suggestions for helping our patients hear in a wide variety of listening conditions. But sometimes, you can find a better fitting—a really excellent fitting–by doing a little trial-and-error rather than depending on the manufacturer’s suggestions. Many years ago I was trying to help

The human ear comes in many different shapes and sizes, some of them highly problematic when you’re trying to fit hearing aids on them. Because patients cannot see deep inside their ears, they are unaware if their ears have some peculiarity. As a result, they are not sympathetic with the inherent problem facing the audiologist who is trying to help

Humans are funny creatures. We have a great capacity for logical thought and reasoning, but much of the time we fall back on our primeval emotions: caution, fear, and anxiety. It is easy for us to “think” about something that is good for us – an exercise or diet plan comes to mind, but it is often difficult for us

A few years ago audiologists spent a lot of time arguing about which real-ear target was best. Now, we don’t usually discuss targets any more, as most of us rely on the manufacturer’s software to give us an estimate of the sound produced by the hearing aid. (We recognize that this is a mistake, but we do it anyway.) We

Everyone who works with hearing aids or wears a hearing aid is familiar with feedback. It’s that nasty screech you get when you put your hand up to your ear or when a friend gives you a warm hug. Hearing aid practitioners spend a lot of time dealing with feedback. Today, I want to discuss the “seeds” of feedback, a

When I’m talking with my patients, I like to compare eyeglasses and hearing aids. They are familiar with bifocals and understand how they work for different viewing situations: the upper lens is for distance, the lower lens for close-up work. Similarly, hearing aids have multiple programs that are adjusted for specific listening situations. The first program, often called the default

Every year, hearing aids become more complicated, as the number of bands and automatic features increases. Despite that, these new and improved instruments are “easy to program” and “reports on them from early sales are astonishing” – or so we are told by the sales staff for the manufacturers. In fact, when we order a set of new hearing aids,

  Every hearing care professional understands that people’s ability to understand words deteriorates markedly as their hearing threshold increases. When patients can hear sounds near 0 dB, you expect them to have perfect unaided word understanding ability. But when a patient has a flat 80-dB sensorineural hearing loss, you do not expect him or her to understand words very well

If you listed the most common problems that your hearing aid patients complain of when they return to your office, number one on the list would be, “I can hear, but I can’t understand the words.” Or, to put it differently, “The hearing aids are giving me more sound, but this sound does not help me distinguish the words people

If you are looking for a simple, bare-bones definition of audiology, here it is: Audiology is the profession that figures out and fixes difficult hearing problems. People come to us and say, “I can’t hear…” and complete their sentence with phrases like “…my wife, the TV, my grandchildren, what people are saying when I’m in a group.” The remediation of