Hear In Private Practice

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

This post is a Reader’s Choice selection for 2013.   By Diana Holan, MS There are currently more than 250,000 hip replacements performed in the US annually.  This procedure was relatively uncommon before the late 1990s, but with the development of titanium and cobalt/chromium metal-on-metal (MoM) bearing surfaces, sales rapidly increased and a highly competitive market was born.  But new

Dear Readers: During this holiday season, the editors at Hearing Health & Technology Matters (HHTM) are taking some time off. However, we are not leaving you without anything to read on our blog this week. Instead, we are publishing a special holiday edition filled with what we call our Readers’ Choices. The Readers’ Choices are the posts published on each

There are times when I am out walking with my architect husband and he points out what bothers him on a building about the design. I say, “Don’t show me, I wouldn’t even notice that unless you pointed it out, thanks!”  Therein lies the rub, when a person says to me, “I have an inner ear infection!” Sometimes I just

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

What is Barotrauma?  In general terms it is an injury to organs due to the change in atmospheric pressure.  In this post, I will concentrate on Ear Barotrauma.  I had my first encounter with this phenomenon in my early 20s.  I was visiting friends who lived in Phoenix and we went to Flagstaff for the day.  As we were returning down

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

The following is our Monthly selection from Marshall Chasin’s article published in the Hearing Review.   By Marshall Chasin Several years ago I was asked to be an expert witness by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, which was contemplating an action against the local police services board regarding an upcoming G20 meeting in Toronto.  The police services board was considering

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