Hear In Private Practice

Dec. 16, 2013

Infection in which part of the ear?

Hearing Health & Technology Matters
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
Dec. 11, 2013

Do the Hearing Aids You Fit Sound Clear?

Bob Martin
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,
Nov. 27, 2013

As patients’ hearing thresholds rise, what percentage of speech cues do they miss?

Bob Martin
  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
Nov. 19, 2013

Barotrauma: How Changing Pressure Affects the Ear

Hearing Health & Technology Matters
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
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Nov. 13, 2013

“I can hear, but I can’t understand the words”

Bob Martin
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
Nov. 05, 2013

LRADs, trumpets, and loudspeakers

Hearing Health & Technology Matters
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
Oct. 30, 2013

Use the window of hearing to help patients with poor hearing

Bob Martin
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
Oct. 22, 2013

Say What? – Understanding Auditory Processing Disorders

Hearing Health & Technology Matters
Hearing loss isn’t just about the ear’s ability to process sound and send the signal to the brain. How the central nervous system processes the sound is a large contributor to speech perception.  The central nervous system plays an active role in working memory, language, and attention.  Auditory Processing Disorders (APD) are also referred to as Central Auditory Processing Disorders
Oct. 16, 2013

Give your patients an extra pair of earmolds, so they hear well all the time

Bob Martin
I believe that you should make a “spare” set of earmolds for every one of your patients with significant hearing loss. The wisdom of this advice may not be evident, so let me elaborate. Hearing aid technology is complex. However, few hearing aid users understand this complexity until they have worn hearing aids for a number of years. Unlike other
Oct. 08, 2013

Back to Basics: The limitations and the benefits of a flared tubing

Hearing Health & Technology Matters
Our Editor of @Hear the Music, Marshall Chasin is writing a monthly column in The Hearing Review.  With permission we will be posting Dr. Chasin’s  articles in our @HearingHealth section. The science of flared or belled tubing is something that many of us were more aware of in the 1980s than we are today.  In the 1980s, because of the