Hearing Views

                                                            By Joseph Cerquone My co-worker sounded surprised. The preceding weekend, she told me, she had watched a newscaster put down New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plans to launch a

By David H. Kirkwood As AudiologyNOW! gets under way today in Anaheim, I‘d like to congratulate the American Academy of Audiology on its 25th birthday and its 25th annual convention. I’m sure the 2013 edition, like each of the previous 20 or so, will again attract the largest turnout of audiologists and audiology students anywhere in the world this year.

By Lauren E. Storck A survey conducted recently by the Collaborative for Communication Access via Captioning (CCAC) revealed that the benefits of real-time captioning for persons with hearing loss are both diverse and important. Responses from the 220 survey participants also underscored the need to make real-time captioning more widely available globally. CCAC is an international non-profit organization that advocates for

By Lily Weaver Unfortunately, drug addiction is a problem that is believed to affect the deaf community even more than it affects the hearing community. Debra Guthmann, a former president of the National Association on Alcohol, Drugs, and Disability, estimates that one in seven deaf people in the United States suffers from substance dependency, as compared to one in ten

By David H. Kirkwood It’s not often that commercial television airs something as bold and downright different as last week’s episode of Switched at Birth, an ABC Family program that is shown Mondays at 9 pm Eastern. In case you’ve never watched Switched, the premise is that two baby girls born the same day in the same hospital are sent

The following Hearing View combines two posts that the author, Alan Desmond, AuD, originally published on January 16 and 23 on his blog, Dizziness Depot.  I am republishing them here because I believe that Alan’s cogent reporting and commentary on questionable sales practices in the health care field deserve a broader audience. On March 1, I tried to reach Dr.

By David H. Kirkwood One of my all-time favorite posts on my colleague Gael Hannan’s Better Hearing Consumer blog is called “Face me, Doc, I’m still hard of hearing.” In her characteristically humorous style, Gael describes the travails she has faced in her dealings with medical personnel of various kinds. There’s her visit to an ENT (of all people!) who

By George Lyons Jr. Upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court last year and the centerpiece of the Obama Administration’s first term, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) is on track to trigger change in the U.S. health care system that will have an impact on how audiologists practice. It is important, therefore, for audiologists  to understand how the

By Ted Venema I believe there is a huge gap between the science of middle ear transmission and the clinical application of tympanometry. This is especially apparent for the clinician who attempts to make the leap from typical tympanometry to multi-frequency tympanometry. It concerns the vertical axis of the tympanogram. Obfuscation (look it up) offers lots of Impedance but little

By David H. Kirkwood “There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.” The truth of that statement, originally written by Victor Hugo (in French), has been proven over and over. One example from the field of hearing care is universal newborn hearing screening (UNHS). Twenty-five years ago, I doubt there was a country or state or