Hearing Loss Help  

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A hard of hearing teacher wrote:

It seems to me that loop systems and FM systems are better for students than for teachers. How would either benefit a teacher? It seems that those systems are set up to have one person (usually the teacher) wear the microphone and the sound gets to the students. But how does that work when there are 25 kids and the teacher is hard of hearing?

This is a basic problem with assistive devices such as room loops and FM systems. They are made to go from one hearing person to one or more hard of hearing people, not from many hearing people to one hard of hearing person like you need.

If you had a small classroom, it is possible to add 2 or 3 microphones scattered around the room all feeding into a loop system for example—but the students still must pass the microphones around for this to be truly effective.

One solution (and one that was specifically designed for a hard of hearing teacher by the way) is to use a PockeTalker, neckloop and a super-directional microphone. I have found this combination is quite effective. Typically, I use mine at noisy conferences, but it also works well in quiet situations as well. You might want to try it and see how well it works for you.

If you are going to use this system with your hearing aids, you need hearing aids with t-coils. Then you need a PockeTalker, a neckloop and the super-directional microphone I love.

If you don’t wear hearing aids, you can skip the neckloop and add earbuds instead. I often do this as it works wonderfully well for my particular hearing loss.

Note: when you switch your hearing aids to t-coil mode, much of the background noise in the classroom is blocked out. You only hear what enters the directional microphone. Compared to just using your hearing aids, the difference is quite dramatic.

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A concerned mother asked:

My daughter is 9 years old and she has been hearing impaired since she was about 2½. She has bilaterally enlarged vestibular aqueducts, and she also has only 1½ turns on her cochlea. My question is, do you think it would be safe for her to go into the mountains in Colorado? We live in Illinois and want to drive to Colorado, but I wasn’t sure whether the high altitude would affect her hearing. She already has severe loss in her left ear and moderate to severe loss in her right ear. I don’t want to take any chances with her hearing!

I can understand your dilemma. There are no guarantees that the air pressure changes in the Colorado mountains won’t affect her hearing. However, you can make an educated guess and then act accordingly. Here’s how I would do it.

First, look at her previous hearing history. If her hearing hasn’t changed much, or at all, since she was 2½, then it is unlikely that the change in air pressure will affect her now. However, if every little bang on her head has affected her hearing, that would be different.

Second, if sudden changes in air pressure (fast moving storms, or going up or down hills) cause hearing problems, then the change in altitude could do the same. But if there haven’t been any problems so far, then she will probably be fine.

Third, has she flown before? If so, did it cause any hearing problems? If not, then driving in the mountains in Colorado wouldn’t be much different than flying in a pressurized plane as they pressurize a plane to somewhere below 8,000 feet or so.

Children with LVAS who have stable hearing for a number of years have likely experienced all of the above in the past, and thus aren’t likely to be affected by similar activities in the future, including enjoying the wonders of the high mountains in Colorado.

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

One lady asked,

I was wondering if it is possible to speech read what people are saying if you can’t hear them at all? I am finding that if I can hear them even a little bit, I can speech read a lot of what they are saying. but if I can’t hear them at all, I have a real hard time making out words. Does this make sense?

You are right on target. You can often speechread short remarks quite well without hearing a sound, but for longer conversations even a bit of hearing makes understanding ever so much easier.

For example, studies have shown that by using residual hearing alone, or speechreading alone, you might get about 20-30% of the conversation, but when using both your residual hearing and speechreading at the same time, you can expect to get 80% or even more. This is my experience also.

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

In the March, 2008 issue, I reported on an interesting treatment for hearing loss. There has been a fair bit of interest in this treatment as evidenced by the various comments on the HearingLossHelp blog. You can read the original article and comments here.

In part, here is Rick Walter’s comment (#15) on what has been happening with his ears since he began taking Aldosterone two months ago. He writes:

I’ve been taking Aldosterone therapy for about 2 months now. My hearing loss came from many things. Much came from loud noise over my lifetime, but I came down with Meniere’s disease about a year ago, and the hearing loss greatly accelerated.

The Aldosterone gave me back clarity of hearing, but only a little volume. Make no mistake any improvement is huge when your ears are as bad as mine are. Also my drop attacks and weird dizziness are completely gone!

Obviously, Aldosterone is not a complete cure for hearing problems, but just improving clarity of hearing (improved discrimination) is a wonderful blessing in itself.

Also, it seems that Aldosterone can help fix a damaged balance system. For example, reducing the frequency of, or totally eliminating, drop attacks is certainly another blessing. (Drop attacks are where, without warning, you suddenly lose your balance and fall to the floor. This typically happens in people with severe cases of Meniere’s disease.)

If you are interested in Aldosterone therapy either contact Dr. Jonathan Wright (see above link) or work with your doctor while you are on this therapy so bad things don’t happen to you. With Aldosterone, as with other body hormones, too much of a good thing can quickly become a bad thing.

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A lady wrote:

Some drugs, such as Neurontin [Gabapentin] or Xanax [Alprazolam] have been recommended as treatments for tinnitus. Is not this contradictory since they can also cause tinnitus? Xanax does lower it for me, temporarily; and Neurontin does lower it while the drug is in my system.

The above drugs are ototoxic—they can damage your ears. One of their side effects is tinnitus as you know. Although, some doctors still prescribe these drugs for tinnitus control, the truth is, the FDA has not approved a single drug as being effective for tinnitus—so that should tell you something right there—that these drugs have not been proven to reduce tinnitus.

In my opinion, what these drugs do is not affect the tinnitus as such, but change your response to your tinnitus. In other words when you take such drugs, you don’t worry about your tinnitus as much, even though it is still there. Thus, it doesn’t seem so loud and intrusive.

The proof that these drugs don’t really do anything to “cure” your tinnitus is that when you stop taking them, your tinnitus is just as loud as it was before.

Thus, if you take one of these drugs for tinnitus, it may give you a bit of apparent temporary relief—but that is it. You need to begin practicing the various tinnitus treatments that will help you get your tinnitus under control in the long term.

If you are interested in learning more about what you can do to help bring your tinnitus under your control, you would do well to read my book, “When Your Ears Ring! Cope With Your Tinnitus—Here’s How“.

by Neil Bauman, Ph.D.

A man wrote:

During the past few years I’ve found that understanding speech on the telephone has become increasingly difficult. I wonder if this issue has been addressed.

1) Are there certain types of phones that make this more of a problem (i.e. portable phones)?

2) Are people generally speaking much more rapidly, contributing to increased difficulty?

3) I’ve found that people with unfamiliar accents are a particular problem.

I’d appreciate your thoughts on this subject.

The most likely reason for having trouble understanding speech—on the phone, or in person—is that you have a high-frequency hearing loss. Since most of the “intelligence” of speech is in the higher frequencies, if you have a high-frequency loss, you hear people talking just fine, but you can’t always understand what they are saying.

What can make a difference between phones is that some phones have better high-frequency sound than others so you would hear better on them. There are special amplified phones that emphasize the higher frequencies to help people like you hear (and understand) on the phone better. A good example of such a phone is the TeleTalker. However, you need to be aware that phones all cut off somewhere around 3,000 to 3,500 Hz., so you’ll never be able to hear frequencies higher than that no matter which phone you try.

In addition, some people mumble or don’t talk directly into the receiver, which sure doesn’t help. When you have any hearing loss, it takes your brain longer to decode speech, so when people talk fast, or mumble, or have accents, you miss more as your brain vainly struggles with all this extra processing and just can’t keep up.

Finally, you should be aware that high-frequency hearing loss sneaks up on you so you are often not even aware of how much you are really missing. You should go to an audiologist and have your hearing evaluated. You might be surprised how much hearing loss you actually have.