Alison Coetzee Audiology

ears@octive.co.za

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First time hearing aid use – Alison Coetzee Audiology

First time hearing aid use

First time hearing aid use.

When you first wear hearing aids, you might be astonished by all the sounds that you used to be able to hear. This is especially true if you have had hearing loss for a long time. Certain sounds may initially seem excessively loud and overwhelming. Your brain will eventually retrain itself to recognize and process specific sounds, disregarding others. This is a timely process and can sometimes take months of hearing aid use to achieve.

Everyone is different

Your brain will eventually retrain itself to recognize and process specific sounds, disregarding others. This is a timely process and can sometimes take months of hearing aid use to achieve. However, wearing hearing aids should never result in discomfort to the degree where wearing them causes emotional distress or pain. Sometimes the task of re introducing certain sounds to the brain requires a bit more patience, and an individual’s hearing aids might need to be set on a lower setting of amplification than is regarded as optimal. Once the wearer is comfortable with this setting, the hearing care professional can increase the amplification until the optimal level is reached. Unfortunately, due to the phenomenon of neural degradation and cross modal reorganization, some individuals are never able to handle the full prescribed amplification needed to be hearing sounds ‘normally’. Nevertheless, these individuals should still make use of hearing aids to slow down any further decline in sound processing. This is also why it is important to have realistic expectations from hearing aid use. For example, if someone has gone 10 years with an untreated hearing loss (regardless of severity), it cannot be expected that that they’ll immediately be able to process sound optimally once given access to these sounds again.

Importance of hearing aid use

Those with mild to moderate hearing loss usually have no difficulty following conversation in a quiet, one on one interaction without their hearing aids. The hearing loss usually becomes more prominently noticed in group situations or in scenarios with competing background noise. While it might seem like an obvious choice to only then wear hearing aids in these challenging situations, this limits the intended benefit of the hearing aids. If you’re always missing out on sounds while alone, giving your brain access to all these sounds only in a difficult listening environment will overwhelm an auditory cortex that hasn’t been kept fit for these situations. By wearing hearing aids at every waking moment, you are training your brain to become familiar with sounds amplified by the hearing aids. This way, when you’re faced with a more challenging listening environment, your brain won’t be as overwhelmed and you’ll be able to experience the full benefit of wearing your devices.

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