What to expect from hearing aids

Expectations from Hearing Aids

Improvement in Hearing

Hearing aids will improve your hearing. You should be able to hear voices at a more comfortable loudness. People talking in a normal voice should be more easily heard. You will probably be able to turn the television down to a more normal level. Listening may be less stressful. It is important to understand, however, that while hearing aids will improve your hearing, your hearing will not return to normal. This means that you may still have some problems understanding certain words in some situations. For example, hearing aids cannot make people speak slower or clearer. So improvement in hearing, but not normal hearing should be expected.

Why can’t hearing aids simply amplify sound enough to get you back to normal? The answer is in the complexity of what happens when hearing loss occurs. In addition to losing volume, a hearing loss can cause the ear to introduce some distortion into the sounds that you hear, causing a loss in the clarity of the sound. Making speech sounds louder so that you can hear them will be helpful, but the distortion introduced by the impaired ear may keep sounds from being crystal clear. As advanced as hearing aids are today, they cannot duplicate the complexity of the human ear.

How much improvement you obtain with hearing aids depends on a number of factors. Some types of hearing loss will benefit more from hearing aids than others. If your hearing is normal over a large part of the speech range, then you may notice benefit, but less benefit than if you had hearing loss over the entire speech range. Another factor is how well you understand words when they are made loud enough for you to hear them. If words are difficult for you to understand even when they are loud enough for you to hear, then hearing aids, while still helpful, may not provide as much improvement for you as you might like. Finally, the specific situations in which you experience difficulty will affect how much benefit you might achieve. Typically, the quieter the listening situation, the more benefit you may obtain.

Hearing aids will make you and others sound different at first When you first listen through your hearing aids, you will notice that some things sound different, even your own voice. Your voice is being amplified and having hearing aids in your ear can affect how your voice sounds to you. These changes in how your voice sounds to you are typically temporary. The more you wear your hearing aids, the quicker your own voice will start to sound normal to you again.

Other people’s voices may sound different as well. The hearing aids are amplifying differently in various pitch ranges (depending on your hearing loss), so you may be hearing some pitches in others voices that you haven’t been hearing, thus making their voices sound different. Again, with time you adapt to these changes and they become part of what you expect to hear as you hear yourself and others better.

Hearing aids will put you back in touch with sounds around you If your hearing loss has slowly decreased over the years, which is most typical, then you have probably become used to a quieter life than in the past. Many of the normal environmental sounds that you used to hear quite easily may now be very soft or inaudible. During the first several months of wearing hearing aids, you will notice many of these sounds again. At first, some of these sounds may be annoying or bothersome. Some people complain at first of hearing sounds like the refrigerator running, tires on the car while driving or heels clicking on the floor while walking. You will notice these sounds at first because your brain is alerting to them. After several months of hearing these sounds, you will start to notice them less and less, and your brain will move them into the background where they belong. The ability to hear softer sounds will indicate that your hearing is improving, and you will be able to better hear people talking to you in normal and softer levels.

Background noise – will hearing aids help?

One of the most frustrating situations you can encounter with a hearing loss is trying to understand someone in a noisy area, such as a busy restaurant or loud party. While people with normal hearing also have difficulty in noisy situations, the ability to understand someone talking in a background of noise is more severely affected when hearing loss is present. Hearing loss makes it very difficult, if not sometimes impossible, to extract that one person that you want to hear from a sea of background noise. So hearing loss not only reduces the loudness of sounds, but also makes it more difficult to separate one sound from another. Can hearing aids help in this situation? In many cases, hearing aids do help. However, if it is a loud situation, hearing aids may not offer as much assistance as you might like. Hearing aids cannot separate a voice that you want to hear from other voices that you do not want to hear.

If it is a noisy situation and a person is not talking loud enough for you, and the background noise is not overwhelming, then a hearing aid may prove helpful. However, if a person is talking loudly enough but you cannot understand them because the background noise is louder than their voice, then the hearing aid may not prove helpful.

There are some special features in more advanced hearing aids that attempt to help in background noise. For example, they may provide less volume increases for sounds that come from behind you. Some hearing aids attempt to reduce amplification for sounds that it does not recognize as speech. As hearing aid technology improves, more efforts will be made to help you in these difficult situations.

Expect better hearing

Hearing aids provide most people with significant hearing improvement. They make it easier to hear people who are talking in a normal or soft voice. You should not have to strain as hard to hear and listening is typically not as stressful. How much benefit you receive may depend on your hearing loss, your word understanding, and the specific situations in which you experience difficulty. While hearing aids are not a cure for all your hearing problems, when combined with good listening skills, they can definitely improve your quality of life.

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