A few years ago my Dr, recommended I get hearing aids. My hearing loss is over 50% he says. Anyway it seems like hissing sounds of letters with a hiss are about the only ones I really struggle with and that is ony if I am not looking at you when we are speaking. The prices through my medical start at about $2,000. I was looking online today and see hearing aids starting as low as 15.00 up to about 100.00. Are these lower price hearing aids effective?
I feel like that would be the difference between picking up some readers at the dollar store instead of going to an eye doctor, getting a prescription and taking the prescription to a glasses store that will custom make lenses to fit your glasses and eyes. Like, I can see why people will happily pay just a few dollars for readers, but paying $200 and getting a real pair is probably going to work much better for most people.
I can only assume a $15 hearing aid isn’t custom fit to your ear and it almost certainly won’t have the features the newer ones have. For example a feature I’ve seen on some is a way to pair them with your cell phone via bluetooth. It gives people the ability to use their hearing aid like a bluetooth earpiece, but it also lets them stream music right into their ears, use their phone like a microphone and set it next to someone (say, across the table from them in a loud restaurant) and hear them and even make adjustments on the fly via an app on their phone.
But I’d guess the custom fitting and generally higher quality is what fills the $2000 gap.
I can’t answer the question about whether the cheapo hearing aids are ‘effective,’ as I went with what would be considered a mid-level priced (~$2,500) pair when I was initially fitted for hearing aids. My guess is the lowest cost aids will amplify things but may create other problems, as they have little or no capacity to filter sounds (which can be a big deal). But that’s only an educated guess. I will say, however, that I never realized how much I wasn’t hearing until I started to wear hearing aids. Getting them definitely affected quality of life such that I can justify the fairly significant cost to my own satisfaction.
I often suspect that the biggest problem with my hearing is that I have a constant sound in my ear that sounds like water is running, fairly loud. Every once in a while it stops for some reason but never for more than about 30 minutes at the longest. When it stops I can hear birds chirping that I haven’t heard for years.
Have you had your ears looked at, either by a GP or ENT? If it’s a similar sound to when your ears pop or when you swim/shower and they’re full of water, they may just be impacted with wax. If that’s all it is, it’s no big deal for them to clean them out while you’re sitting there.
That’s been my experience anyway. I was thrilled both times to find that I hadn’t suddenly lost my hearing in one ear, but it just needed to be cleaned.
I don’t have hearing loss, but I’ve recently been helping my father-in-law who does and has a $2,000 set of hearing aids.
My understanding is that when your ears are properly tested at a clinic they determine exactly the frequency range(s) you are missing out on and can customize / tune the hearing aids (by ear) to boost that range of frequencies.
My FIL struggles with background noise and can’t distinguish between the noise and conversation (He can’t follow conversation in a noisy restaurant at all). In addition to overall boosting the frequencies he cannot hear, his $2,000 pair electronically filters out background noise and boosts the frequency range human voices are in. It’s a night and day difference for him.
I’d guess that the $15 pair boosts everything equally like small speakers in both ears. That may make matters worse if your loss is different in each ear.
FWIW - my suggestion would be to do as Joey P suggests - first get your ears professionally cleaned, then go into a properly accredited and recommended hearing clinic and get tested. Once you have a proper baseline, they’ll tell you your options and help you evaluate the benefits versus the cost.
Lastly - Back to Joey P’s comment: We thought my father had huge hearing loss maybe 75%, we could hear the TV from the street in front (seriously). Turned out he hadn’t cleaned his ears in 30 years. At his doctors insistence he had them done professionally and was then tested. He did have about 10% loss, but the rest was wax build up. He didn’t end up with hearing aids at all.
I think this is the important message - you don’t know what you don’t know. Because hearing loss is gradual (the old boiling frog trope) it’s easy to think you don’t have a significant decline. But once you get the right hearing aids, you find yourself saying, “Holy moly! That’s what I’ve been missing?”
The easiest comparison is getting glasses for the first time, you probably felt you were mostly OK without them, then you get them and you understand what you were missing.
I can dig it up, but Adam Savage was talking about his hearing aids in one of his Tested(?) videos. He has the type that can connect to his phone and can change those settings on the fly. He can play around with what frequencies are boosted vs filtered and save customized settings for different situations, for example, being in a loud bar and trying to talk to someone vs sitting in an otherwise quiet room watching TV.
Since your doctor recommended hearing aids, I presume you’ve had a hearing test? If you look at the audiogram it will show you at which frequencies you have hearing loss. Since you mention that sibilants are difficult for you, you probably have more loss at high frequencies, which is common (and what I have). A cheapo couple of hundred bucks hearing aid probably will just amplify all frequencies approximately equally. It might help some, but you really want an aid tailored to your particular hearing loss, so it amplifies the frequencies you need and not the others.
Tinnitus (which I also have) is usually a symptom of hearing loss, not a cause. The way an audiologist explained it to me was, when your brain stops getting a signal at a particular frequency, it doesn’t like that, so it invents its own sound to fill that frequency. There are other types of tinnitus which can be caused by problems in the ear and can even be a real physical sound produced by your auditory apparatus that others can hear, but in most cases it’s a fictitious sound created in your brain as a result of hearing loss.
My hearing loss started over 20 years ago and has been slowly getting worse. Here lately I find myself falling out of group conversations simply because I can’t hear what is being said. My new girlfriend complains a lot as she has a frequency that doesn’t work well for me. I guess I will just bit the bullet and get the better one. I have a weird feeling that I will buy it and not wear it. I mostly would like it for watching movies.
Look for the rechargeable ones. IME hearing aids eat batteries like nothing else I’ve ever seen.
Here’s some background, mentioning (among other things) that Costco is highly rated for customer satisfaction among hearing aid purchasers.
They are not as effective. There is a night-and-day difference between a $2000 hearing aid and a $200 hearing aid.
For $4000 you can get a hearing aid that seems, for most people, to be about as good as a $2000 device, but with more features.
The doctor just about flat-out refused to even turn on the additional features on my mothers hearing aid, because he thinks it’s too confusing. And she’s got no hearing at all in one ear, which makes even a $2000 device much much less effective (your hearing works better when your brain can compare the two signals).
But the deaf people in my family all agree: a $200 hearing aid isn’t worth the trouble of wearing it. A $2000 hearing aid is.
When I got my hearing aids I was amazed at what I had been missing.
I’ve read that the business model for hearing aids is to include follow-up and expendable items. For example, I can get batteries for free by stopping in at the audiologist office. It will take a lot of batteries to make up that initial cost.
Is there a change in the regulations regarding these because i’ve been seeing more direct ads lately. That could be self-fulfilling due to clicking on one items.
The choices needn’t be restricted to either $100 a pair or $2000. The first pair I tried were about $1200 a pair. They were ok but the pair I ended up getting were $1800/pair and were better. A professional audiologist can tell you if there are hearing aids around say $800-$1200/pair that could work for you.
I read a good article recently about a guy who started some mail-order hearing aid company that sells them at a low price (not $15 but a few hundred). The article explained how he was able to offer such a low price and what the aids were missing to be so inexpensive. The guy didn’t come across as a scammer. It seemed fairly reasonable that his aids could improve things for the hearing-impaired but not in an ideal, custom-fit way. I wish I could find it. They were some brand that has been fairly popular lately. Prolly lots of ads on TV but I don’t really watch.
ETA: Whatever you do, make sure you get one with a T-Coil. It’s what lets you direct signals from electronics like cell phone, movies, MP3 player, orators, and concerts directly into your ear (bypassing the aids noisy microphones). mine dont have one and im mad about it!
I went to kaiser for an ear examination and before I got home my email was loaded up with adds for hearing aids, at least 1/2 dozen companies were contacting me. I don’t know if kaiser sells the leads or if employee make a little side money doing it. It sounds like I will need the higher quality, I just hate to spend all that money for something I won’t use all that often.
My ex-wife was an audiologist. She had very little good to say about cheap hearing aids, especially those that are popularly advertised.
As I recall her saying, just as each of your eyes may need a different prescription from the other when you get glasses, so might your ears. The more expensive hearing aids can be adjusted in such a way, so that one ear can easily hear the frequencies that it is poor in, balanced with the frequencies it can hear well;, and given that, it is possible to do the same with the other ear’s hearing aid. In the end, the aim of the hearing aid is true, balanced, binaural hearing.
My ex said that good hearing aids started at about $2000, including professional tests and subsequent frequency adjustments. Excellent hearing aids were about $5000 a pair; including the same. But cheap hearing aids, sold as a “one-size-fits-all” configuration, just amplified everything indiscriminately. You won’t hear everything there is to hear, in other words; you’ll just hear what you can currently hear, only louder.
I just got a new pair if hearing aids a couple weeks ago. My previous pair were middle tier and while they were good, I always had trouble in noisy environments. My audiologist did what she could to adjust them, but always said that the mid-level aids just didn’t have the filtering capabilities of the higher end ones. So when it was time for a new pair she went with the top-notch aids, and insurance paid for about half the cost, so they were about $3000 out of pocket for me.
The filtering in noisy restaurants is so much better, and even in normal environments I can hear things I wasn’t hearing before with the old hearing aids. I can control them with an app on my phone but unfortunately Android phones don’t have the streaming audio capability available yet (although they appear to be working on it for the next release).
Not only yours: my mother was close to losing her children over her refusal to get hearing aids. We were at the point of visiting less and less often because when we were in her house we couldn’t hear ourselves think. I still think the 3K I paid for those aids should have been deductible as Safety Equipment, since they saved us three from losing our hearing or our minds.
Decent hearing aids have adjustable filters: the filters get adapted to the wearer’s specific hearing loss, which makes them more effective and also helps slow further hearing loss. The cheap ones, being just amplifiers, are equivalent to having someone yelling in your ear the whole time or standing right next to the speakers: it doesn’t necessarily make sounds more understandable and can hurt your hearing more.
My #10 hearing aid battery lasts about three days, or around 30 hours (I shut it down at night). It would actually last longer, but the hearing aid is deigned to shut down as soon as the voltage begins to fall, so that there is no period of time when the aid functions imperfectly due to falling battery power.