What you can expect from your hearing aids

There has been a big improvement in hearing aid technology in recent years. These little devices can give enormous benefit to you in terms of your communication and general quality of life! But we must remember that they cannot make your hearing perfect again. They are, after all, an aid.

Hearing loss can be caused by many different things, but what it comes down to is a problem or dysfunction in the hearing system. This problem will remain even if hearing aids are fitted and therefore it is not likely that you will get back 100% of your hearing. However, it is realistic to expect to make far less errors than made before the hearing aid fitting, and that is still much better than before!

This could mean that the hearing aid wearer can now follow conversation without asking for people to repeat themselves. This could help you to feel more confident and less embarrassed.

It takes effort and team work from both yourself and the audiologist to get ‘the right fit’ for a hearing aid. We live in a noisy world, don’t you remember? As hearing loss related to age is a process of slow decline, many patients have not heard some sounds in years or even decades! The main aim of hearing aids is to provide access to the full range of speech sounds. But there are lots of other sounds too that are in the same range. It can be overwhelming at first to process all the ‘new’ sounds. It’s a complex task to get the best settings for each individual.

At the end of the day, hearing aids are electronic devices that use microphones to detect sound in the environment. This can make some things sound different to how the patient is used to hearing them. However, they really are amazing things that have had a huge impact on the lives of many. Being able to reconnect with family and friends while being confident to take part in activities that make them happy definitely makes that little bit of persistence all worthwhile!