Frustrated with Your Hearing Aids? Consider Changing Your Audiologist

What if you did this one thing and it significantly improved your hearing?

Hey guys, Cliff Olson, Doctor of Audiology and founder of Applied Hearing Solutions in Phoenix, Arizona. And in this video I'm gonna show you how getting a second opinion on your hearing aid treatment could be the smartest thing you ever do.

So if you've been watching my channel for a while now, you already know that I constantly talk about the importance of best practice Audiologic care when it comes to hearing aid performance. But if this concept of best practices is new to you, let me briefly explain what they are.

Essentially, they are a series of considerations and procedures that must be completed by your hearing care professional in order for you to hear your absolute best with your hearing aids. Best practices matter significantly more than the best hearing aids because even if you have the best, most expensive hearing aids in the world, you'll never receive the full potential out of those devices unless best practices are performed.

Unfortunately, most experts estimate that the percentages of hearing care professionals who actually follow these comprehensive AUDIOLOGIC best practices is only around 15 to 30%. And based off of my conversations with a lot of hearing care professionals at this point, I would suspect that these percentages are rather high and it's probably closer to 5% or below, which means that if you wear hearing aids, there is an extremely high chance that you are not actually hearing your best with your hearing aids. And that getting a second opinion from a hearing care professional who does follow best practices would result in a significantly better treatment outcome.

Now, my clinic sees hundreds of new patients every single year who are looking for a second opinion on their hearing treatment because they're just not performing that well. Now these patients are coming from virtually everywhere. We're talking big box stores, ENT clinics, retail chains, online retailers, and yes, even private practices.

But let me give you a real world example of a patient that I recently saw who came over from Costco to get a second opinion on his hearing treatment. But before I do, if you could do me a huge favor and click the like button, it really helps out the channel because it gets these videos in front of a broader audience. And while you're at it, if you have not yet hit that subscribe button with notification Bell, go ahead and do that as well, because that ensures that you never miss one of my newly released videos and I release a ton of new videos every single week. That being said, I really appreciate it.

Now let's take a look at this patient who came in for a second opinion. Now I'm gonna go ahead and call this patient John. Now, John has been wearing Costco hearing aids for the past 10 years, and he has never felt that he's heard very well with them. He has tried every single brand of hearing aid from this big box retailer and multiple different providers trying to set those devices up. But he has still had the exact same outcome as an experienced hearing aid user, he just assumed that this was the highest level of treatment outcome that he could achieve, even though the amount of benefit was minimal.

But after he came into my clinic and told me all this and I took him through a comprehensive hearing evaluation, it just didn't make a whole lot of sense. I mean, he had a relatively easy hearing loss to treat. All of the X's and O's on his audiogram were well within the range of what's treatable with the hearing aid. His word recognition scores were above 90%, which means that he could understand speech very well in a quiet situation. And his speech and noise score was really good as well, which means that he should not be struggling that much in background noise either.

Basically, John's testing indicated that he should not be struggling in quiet situations, even with soft talkers, and he should be performing relatively well in background noise environments while he's wearing his hearing aids. But this assumes that his hearing aids were set up correctly. So I did some further investigation.

First, I did a critical but relatively uncommon procedure called test box measures to see if his hearing aids were meeting manufacturer specifications and they were, which means that his hearing aids were mechanically functioning properly. But then I performed real ear measurement and I found the problem almost immediately.

Now, real ear measurement is a procedure that is performed to verify that a hearing aid has been programmed properly to somebody's hearing loss prescription. This procedure is performed while you're actually wearing the hearing aids and those hearing aids are being programmed. Now, I won't get into the specifics or the details of how this procedure is exactly performed. If you wanna learn more about that, I will link this video down in the description. But let me go ahead and go over the results of what I found.

With John's hearing aids, I started by measuring how well John's hearing aids were programmed to his average level speech prescription. The prescription for John's hearing loss is indicated by the pink hash mark line. The amount of amplification that we measured coming out of John's hearing aids is indicated by the solid pink lines. Ideally, what we would like to see is the solid lines overlapping with the hash mark lines as closely as possible. Anywhere the solid lines are below the hash mark lines, he would be under amplified, and anywhere the solid lines are above the hash mark lines, he would be over amplified.

Based on this, we can easily identify that John is significantly under amplified across nearly his entire prescription, which means that the sounds that he's missing due to his hearing loss are not being properly amplified by his hearing aids for him to hear them.

But considering that understanding soft talkers was even a more difficult situation for John, I decided to verify whether or not his hearing aids were programmed properly to his soft level speech prescription. Following the same line of thinking from an average level prescription match, we are now using a turquoise hash mark line to indicate his soft level prescription and the solid turquoise line to indicate the amplification levels coming from his hearing aids.

These measures indicated that the needed amplification is even further below his soft level prescription making, hearing and understanding soft talkers even more difficult for John than average level talkers, essentially confirming the concerns that John had prior to taking these measurements.

To add insult to injury, in order to achieve these prescriptive targets, John would've had to been wearing custom ear molds with his hearing aids, and he was just using open rubber domes, meaning that no matter how hard a provider tries to match his prescriptive targets by adjusting the amplification inside of the programming software, all of this sound would just leak out of his ears and he would not actually be able to perceive the benefit.

After getting John better hearing aids and new custom ear molds with acoustically optimized vents, we were able to match his prescriptive targets much more precisely. This resulted in a significantly better treatment outcome for John to the point where all the complaints that he had had over the past 10 years were all completely gone.

Now, I know that there are people out there who would say, "Cliff, you're just picking on Costco again." And sure, Costco is probably the most egregious violator of this, but this can literally happen anywhere. And all it took for John to fix his problem was to get a second opinion from a different hearing care professional. Now, he is hearing better than he has in over a decade, but how do you know if the person you're going to to get a second opinion is actually capable of identifying the problem with your existing treatment set up so you can get a better outcome?

Well, you have to find a hearing care professional who follows comprehensive Audiologic best practices and does it in a person centered care way. And that's why I recommend that you go to my website hearingup.com and find a Hearing Up network member in your area. Hearing Up members are committed to following comprehensive Audiologic best practices to ensure that you can hear your absolute best with your hearing aids.

So if you question your overall hearing performance and you think you should get a second opinion, finding a Hearing Up network member near you might be the best decision you ever make. Unfortunately, John's story is not a unique one. We see cases just like this and even worse on a daily basis.

The worst part is this should never happen with all of the modern verification and validation techniques that we have at our disposal as hearing care professionals. And yet there are literally tens of thousands of individuals who struggle with their hearing, despite already having hearing aids because they think that this is just the best that they will ever hear. And all they need to do is get a second opinion from a hearing care professional who follows best practices and knows what they're doing.

So if you're one of these people who thinks that you should be hearing better than what you're currently hearing while using your hearing aids, then getting a second opinion could be the smartest thing you ever do.

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