High Frequency Hearing Aid

[EARTODAY at aol.com]

I have not had positive experiences fitting hearing aids on patients with 
this type of audiogram.  First of all, generally the situations in which 
difficulty is reported occur relatively infrequently and a hearing aid is an 
expensive and cumbersome product to use for such narrow purposes.  Some type 
of ALD may be better.  Secondly it is virtually impossible to amplify above 
3K without amplifying below it, or plugging the ear in some way - a too open 
mold on a BTE generally results in feedback when you approach enough gain.  
And third, I'm not sure what the research says, but often individuals with 
this type of loss blame the loss for difficulty in noise, when in fact, even 
individuals with normal hearing throughout would have difficulty.  As in, the 
patient who says, my hearing aids did not help me hear people talking at the 
wedding I went to (the one where there were 250 people and a band playing 
that could be heard in Ireland) - When you have normal hearing, and you don't 
hear in a situation like this one, you know it is the situation causing the 
problem - individuals with hearing loss sometimes blame their hearing loss, 
when the situation is difficult for everyone.  Angela Loavenbruck