A Letter to People Saying "I Don't Want Hearing Aids"
Maria Brown started her clinic, the Maria Brown Hearing Clinic, 14 years ago in Hobart, Tasmania with the help of her family. She is a qualified Audiometrist with 20+ years of industry experience passionate about helping Tasmanians reconnect with their families.
"I don't want hearing aids". We can assure you the percentage of people that come to see us feel exactly the same way.
Unfortunately, the body deteriorates in many ways and with our hearing, it starts early and we don’t notice until some of the effects of that hearing loss make it difficult to communicate with people.
The 5 points you need to know:
1. Your ability to retain speech understanding
We learn our speech from the time that we are born, and the longer we go without hearing the spoken word at the right level, the harder it is to remember speech.
When we get to the point that we have a severe hearing loss the brain is not just unable to hear, it is unable to understand.
We go from "I’m missing some things when I am listening to people speaking" to "I am not actually understanding what they are saying".
Hearing aids become much harder to adapt to when we get to this level.
2. Why would you want to be missing out?
So many times we see people changing their whole lifestyle over the fact that they can’t hear. People stop going out, don’t see their friends anymore, grandchildren can’t be heard and aren't allowed to be visited.
Unfortunately, this also happens at the best time of our lives: RETIREMENT.
Why would you allow this to happen? Vanity? It is more noticeable when you can’t hear than it is that you're wearing a hearing aid.
3. What happens to your friends does not happen to you
Hearing is a personalised process! You do not have the same hearing loss as your friends.
You can’t wear your friends’ glasses so why do you believe that you can wear your friends hearing aids and have the same experience as they do?
The only way to know is to try them for yourself. A specialist will tailor the hearing system to your needs as it is your hearing loss. One size does not fit all.
4. You get what you pay for
If you get your hearing aids for free then you get what you pay for. The industry is designed in technology levels. The better the hearing aids the better the solution for you.
If you want the best out of the free hearing aids then sorry, that is not going to happen. Many of your friends will complain about their hearing aids but they actually got them for free.
The question you need to ask your friends is did they pay for them? If they did, then the next question is then why do you accept the fact that you are not happy when you have paid good money for your hearing aids?
You would not buy a car just to put it in the garage and then say "well, that was a waste of money"!
5. Top of the range hearing aids: Yes. They are better for YOU
The industry puts all of their research money into these hearing aids. The technology that is in these aids is designed to get the message to the brain the fastest with maximum speech understanding.
Now, why is fast better? Because when we lose our hearing the message is not getting there fast enough to follow a conversation.
Justifying the spend is the issue for everyone. Not whether the lower levels will do the same job because they won’t.
Top range work better, especially in background noise. The newest of the top of the range hearing aids is a very sophisticated computer that sorts your environment for you—it automatically adapts!
