A man explained,

My wife has hearing loss and suffers greatly in trying to understand speech. She is certainly not completely deaf. She can hear noises, music, slow and clear talk, but not many other words. Is there any solution?

Your wife not only has problems hearing, she also has a problem with speech discrimination.

Note: some people get confused between the words “discrimination” and “comprehension” and use the terms interchangeably. Technically, discrimination is whether you can distinguish one sound from another—for example, did you hear the word “put” or the word “but”? In contrast, comprehension is whether you understand what the sounds/words mean.

You could have normal hearing and perfect discrimination, but zero comprehension, for example, listening to a foreign language. In that case you could hear and distinguish all the individual sounds, but not have a clue what it all means.

However, in real life, you don’t have perfect hearing. Typically as your hearing drops, your discrimination also drops. Thus, speech becomes fuzzier and fuzzier. As a result, you miss many of the words. This, in turn, causes your comprehension of the message to drop drastically too.

High-frequency hearing loss and speech discrimination often go hand-in-hand. In fact, the most common cause of poor speech discrimination is poor hearing in the higher frequencies.

The reason high-frequency hearing loss affects discrimination so much is because in order to understand speech, you need to hear the critical high-frequency components of speech.

Unfortunately, most hard of hearing people hear low-frequency sounds much better than they do high-frequency sounds—yet these low frequency sounds, although relatively loud, don’t add much intelligence to speech like the soft high-frequency sounds do.

Thus a common complaint of many hard of hearing people—and your wife is no exception—is that they can hear people talking (because they can hear low-frequency sounds quite well), but have a great deal of difficulty understanding what people are saying (because they can’t hear the softer high-frequency sounds that are so critical to understanding speech).

There are three basic things you can do to help correct this problem. One is to get close to the person speaking. Two is to amplify the high-frequency component of speech. Three is to cut out competing background noise. All three of these are important. Let’s look at each of them in turn.

1. Get Close

If you have a high-frequency hearing loss, the reason you want to get close to the person speaking is that those critical to understanding high-frequency sounds do not travel well in air and are quickly attenuated.

The ideal would be to have a person speak just 2″ from your ear so all the high-frequency components of speech enter your ear canal and don’t get “lost” in the air with increasing distance. In most cases this is impractical, but you can simulate the same degree of closeness by using an assistive listening device that has its microphone at the speaker’s lips and by wearing ear buds plugged into the same amplifier as the microphone.

2. Amplify the High-frequency Components of Speech

The way you do this is to get and wear properly-fitted hearing aids. The hearing aids will be set to amplify the high-frequency component of speech without amplifying the lower-frequency sounds which you already hear fine. Now, since you can hear many/most of the higher-frequency sounds, you can better understand speech.

3. Cut Out Background Noise

Typically, background noise is mostly made up of the louder low-frequency sounds. Since low-frequency sounds mask (or hide) the critical higher-frequency sounds, you now don’t hear those high-frequency sounds critical to understanding speech. So again, you hear people talking, but don’t have a clue what they are saying.

When you cut out all background noise, you greatly increase the chances of understanding speech.

The Ultimate Solution

In order to hear and understand people the best, your wife needs to do all three things at the same time.

First, she needs to cut out any background noise so it doesn’t mask the high-frequency speech sounds. Second, she needs the person speaking to get close to her ears. (Remember, high-frequency sounds don’t travel far through air.) And third, she needs a device to amplify the high-frequency component of speech. (The best way to do this is by her wearing hearing aids.)

When she does all three of these things, your wife will hear the best that her ears will permit her to hear. Unfortunately, since some of the hair cells in her inner ears are dead, doing all this won’t give her normal hearing, and she will still miss things.

Thus, there is one more thing she needs to do—and that is to use her eyes. This takes several forms. People can write down key words she misses; she can watch gestures and facial expressions; but the most important thing she needs to do is to speechread whoever is talking.

Speechreading is far from perfect, but it often greatly increases your comprehension. This is because your eyes can often see the speech sounds that your ears can’t hear. This is because many of the high-frequency speech sounds you can’t hear are relatively easy to speechread. When your brain puts together what your ears hear and what your eyes see, your comprehension soars.

Thus, to best hear and understand what people are saying, your wife needs to remember to cut out background noise, get close to the speaker, wear hearing aids and/or use assistive listening devices and speechread. This sure works for me. It will work for her too!

_____________

If you want to learn speechreading or improve your speechreading skills, you can take local classes. However, it is often difficult to find speechreading classes nearby. If this is your situation, all is not lost. You can also learn to speechread in the privacy of your own home using your computer and the excellent “Seeing and Hearing Speech” CD program.

A wife asked,

I admire those couples who tussle over the TV remote with their spouses. This obviously means they watch TV together. My husband and I have our own TVs in different rooms and never watch TV together. This is a pathetic solution. Is there a way we can amicably watch TV together?

Tussling over the TV remote is a common occurrence with many couples. Add hearing loss to the mix and sometimes the “fur flies” or the couple does what you do and watch their TVs alone in separate rooms. To me this is not the way to enjoy a close marriage.

You need to think outside the box and find a good solution—one that allows you both to enjoy watching TV together, yet having regard for your differences as husband and wife, and the differences in your degrees of hearing.

My wife, Diane, and I watch our TVs together and never tussle with the remote. We have found a solution that works for us. You could do something similar to what we do.

We have our two TVs sitting side by side in the living room. (Looks weird, I know—but it works for us.) Diane watches her TV and I watch mine. She watches one channel (as many women do) while I often flip through all the channels (as many men do) and yet we never interfere with each others programs.

Here’s how we do it. Our “union rules” require that we always have the closed captions visible on both of our TVs. That way either of us can glance over and watch each others’ shows whenever we want to. My TV’s speaker is always muted when Diane is around so I don’t bother her. If I want sound, I just listen through my room loop and t-coils on my hearing aids (or loop receiver when I choose not to wear my hearing aids). In turn, since Diane has much better hearing than I have, she keeps the volume on her TV so low that I can’t hear it. Thus, it doesn’t bother me.

So there we sit—together—watching TV—happy as clams!

A young lady wrote,

I am hoping to get my learner’s license soon. I have some questions. How do you deal with the cops when you are driving? What are you supposed to do when you can’t hear? Do you have any advice about driving with hearing loss?

As far as dealing with the police, the easiest way is to avoid having to get up close and personal with them in the first place. The way you do this is to always obey the traffic laws—no speeding, no running stop signs or red lights, signal before changing lanes, wear your seat belt, no drinking and driving, don’t use your cell phone when driving, etc. When you do this the police will leave you alone. In fact, your chances of being stopped by the police will be almost nil. I know. This has worked for me after driving for more decades than I care to remember.

However, there are always situations beyond your control where you may be unceremoniously pulled over by the police, and they may not be thinking of you very kindly at that moment either. This is when you need to be prepared and do all the right things because you can’t hear what they are telling you.

For example, you may be unlucky enough to have been driving the same make and color of car as the getaway car seen leaving the scene of a violent robbery. It is at night so you can’t see to speechread the officers. What you do next will make the difference between the police treating you and your hearing loss with respect, or finding yourself manhandled and thrown face-down in the mud.

Before you find yourself in such a situation, you need to read my article called “Visor Cards—Bridging the Communications Gap When Stopped by the Police“. This article explains how you can effectively use special visor cards to make the police aware that you can’t hear them. Furthermore, in this article there is a link for downloading and printing your own visor cards for free (or you can purchase them already made up if you so desire).

Tens of thousands of people have already downloaded these visor cards. They are well accepted by police departments. In fact, a number of police departments have asked my permission to print up and distribute these visor cards in their own areas.

In addition to being prepared for the police stopping you, you also need to learn how to drive safely when you can’t hear the warning sirens of emergency vehicles near you. You can learn a number of tips and tricks that will help you in such situations in my article called “Driving Safely with Hearing Loss“.

I wish you well in your driving adventures in the future. Put the tips in these articles in place, and you can expect decades of trouble-free driving in spite of your hearing loss.

A lady asked,

Is there a handy guide that I could give to friends/coworkers, about ways to best communicate with a person with hearing loss. I have seen a couple of lists in the past, but can not find them.

Here are a couple of things that will help you. First, I wrote an article called “Effective Communication in the Family“. In this article, there is a link to a two-page letter that you can freely print out, personalize, sign and give to your anyone (family members, friends, coworkers). This letter gives the most helpful tips on effectively communicating with hard of hearing people.

In addition, I have written a short book on this very subject called “Talking with Hard of Hearing People—Here’s How to Do It Right!” This little book gives 21 tips for talking with hard of hearing people one-to-one or in small groups. It gives an additional 12 tips on talking to hard of hearing people in larger groups and meetings.

Furthermore, there are an additional eight critical tips for talking to hard of hearing people under emergency situations, and another dozen tips for talking to hard of hearing people in hospitals and nursing homes.

Back in August 19, 2006 I wrote a short article called “Press “H” for Human—Voice Menu Hell (Revisited)“. This article explained how you can “force” your phone to get you a live human to speak to, rather than trying it listen to those incessant menus—you know the routine, “Press 1 for “@#n$%f&*C&”, Press 2 for “*$#w#FRf,0*q” and so on.

With our poor hearing, often all we hear is so much gibberish and never know whether we have selected the correct choice or not.

The good news is that there are now, not just one, but two websites that can help you cut through this “voice menu hell” and get you a live person to talk to—one that can help you get to the right department in spite of your poor hearing.

The original one, GetHuman, is still going strong. In addition, a relative newcomer to this field is DialAHuman.

DialAHuman is a simple listing of about 450 companies. It lists the company’s phone number and the way to get a live person fast. For example, if you are phoning Yahoo, their instructions say, “Press 0 repeatedly, ignoring error messages”. (Now you know.)

In contrast, the original service, GetHuman lists thousands of companies, and often several phone numbers to reach those companies. For some companies, they even list a “live person” phone number so you’ll never get a voice menu in the first place.

GetHuman requires two steps. First, find the company listing either by browsing the thousands of entries, or by putting the company name in the search box. Then, when the company info comes up, press “DETAILS” for more information, and sometimes press “DETAILS” again for even more information. The good news is that you get much more information than you get with DialAHuman.

One cool feature of GetHuman is that is also lists the average wait times, whether it is only a matter of minutes (e.g. Verizon wireless only has an average wait time of 4.5 minutes), or hours—yes hours—like Facebook. Their average wait time is listed as a ridiculous 63.2 minutes—and that’s just the average wait time. About half of the people are going to wait much longer than that! Just for kicks I decided to try this number and GetHuman said the average wait time was 348 minutes— that 5.8 hours! (I sure hope they’re wrong!)

If you see that the average wait time is more than you want to wait with your ear glued to the phone all the while straining to listen carefully to those never-ending voice ads to be sure they aren’t the person you are waiting to speak with, here is another neat website for you—LucyPhone.

With LucyPhone you simply go to the LucyPhone website, enter the company’s phone number you want to dial, then enter your own phone number and hit “Start”. LucyPhone then dials your phone and when you answer, connects you with the company, at which point you choose your options. You then hang up your phone and LucyPhone will phone you back when a live person actually comes on the line. Cool, huh?

For decades I’ve wished that doctors, dentists and other health care professionals would wear clear surgical masks so that I could speechread them. I know many of you with more severe hearing losses feel the same.

In the past, I’ve read about clear masks that had been invented, but I never have heard of anyone actually wearing one. Apparently a serious flaw was that these clear masks quickly fogged up from the wearer’s breath, so they were useless for speechreading.

Fortunately for us, that has changed now. I’m actually wearing one of the brand new Nex-Gen Clear Surgical Masks as I type this. I’m experimenting to see whether it fogs up or not.

Now the good news. So far, I can’t make it fog up! It stays crystal clear in spite of my hot breath.

And yes, you really can speechread though this surgical mask. For best results, you want to look at the person from a slight angle, not head on, or the filter might get in your line of sight. (In contrast, the respirator model has the filters to both sides, so for a person wearing this respirator model, you look at the person head on.)

The Nex-Gen masks have a metal nose-bridge piece that you bend to fit the shape of your nose so you get a tight seal. (I found that if I didn’t make a seal tight across the bridge of my nose, my escaping breath fogged up my glasses!)

When wearing these masks, the person’s voice is somewhat reduced in volume and is slightly distorted like you would expect, since the sound of their voice has to come through a filter.

These masks are held in place by two adjustable elastic straps—one above your ears and the other below them. They meet FDA 510K and ISO 10993 standards.

These masks are designed to last for up to a year of use—not bad for a $3.50 investment! You can get these masks in large, small and child’s sizes.

Not only do these clear surgical masks help hard of hearing patients understand their masked health care professionals, but also, they help hard of hearing professionals communicate with their co-workers.

For example, a hard of hearing nurse working in the operating room is at a distinct disadvantage when masked doctors tell her to do something. If all the operating room staff wear these clear surgical masks, then any hard of hearing staff will be able to speechread them.

Spread the word and help these masks to catch on. Send this article to all your doctors, dentists, nurses, paramedics and health care professionals—anyone that typically wears a surgical mask. Let them know just how much these clear masks will help them effectively communicate with you. Ask them to get some of these clear plastic masks and wear them when around you (and other hard of hearing people) when you next visit them.

For further information on the Nex-Gen clear surgical masks go to the Sam-Go Products website. You can contact them via email at or phone them at 817-614-9254.

If you are new to wearing hearing aids, you need to learn the best ways to adapt to wearing your new hearing aids. Otherwise you may dump your new hearing aids in a dresser drawer, give up and conclude hearing aids don’t work—not to mention wasting all those thousands of dollars you just poured down the drain.

It takes time for both you and your ears/brain to adapt to wearing new hearing aids, especially if you have had a long-standing hearing loss, or if you have a more severe hearing loss. It also takes time to learn all the things you need to know about hearing loss and wearing hearing aids. This just doesn’t happen overnight!

For example, if your audiologist turns up the volume on your new hearing aids to where you really need it, a sudden cacophony of sounds you haven’t heard for a long time assaults your ears and overloads your brain. That’s when you reach up and yank your new hearing aids out of your ears and vow never to wear them again.

The solution is to learn to hear again—slowly. You need to start with your hearing aids set softer than optimum and slowly increase the volume over several weeks as your brain relearns how to deal with our noisy world.

In his article “Good habits pave the road to success” (The Hearing Journal, May, 2010) audiologist Robert Martin explains how he puts this concept into practice. For people new to hearing aids, he deliberately sets the initial gain and output settings low. That way he can, “maximize the comfort of the sound and avoid all types of overload.”

Furthermore, Dr. Martin tells his clients that for the first few weeks they should not to wear their hearing aids in crowds or noisy places. I’ve been saying these same things for years.

He has another practice that endears him to me and that is, he sees every newly-fitted client once a week for the first 4 or 5 weeks to make sure everything is working properly.

This has some wonderful advantages that I wish all audiologists and hearing aid dispensers would follow.

First, he can deal with any problems as they come up. For example, he can tweak the hearing aids to eliminate any noise sensitivities such as the dog barking, doors slamming, etc. that otherwise might “blow the top of your head off” when these sounds recruit (you perceive them as abnormally loud).

Second, another advantage of this approach is that he can slowly increase the sound output levels to where they need to be as the person’s brain adjusts to the increased volume of sounds.

Third, he can answer more of their questions as they come to mind. One of the things that hard of hearing people suffer from at the outset is information overload. They just don’t remember all the instructions and guidelines their hearing aid fitters tell them at the time they get their hearing aids. Thus by having his clients come in several times, he spreads this information out over several weeks so it can more easily be assimilated.

In addition to the above, some savvy audiologists give a copy of my article, “Becoming Friends with Your New Hearing Aids” to all their new clients to help them successfully adapt to using their new hearing aids. Here are the last three paragraphs of this article.

Adapting to your new hearing aids may take a week or a month or a year—everyone is different. The important thing is to keep at it. Don’t compare your progress with others.

If you only have a mild loss, you may adapt to your new aids the first day—it may be love at first sound. If your hearing loss is severe, you likely will take much longer to adapt. The same is true if you have had a hearing loss for many years before doing anything about it.

However, when you finally adapt to wearing your hearing aids, something surprising happens. The day will come when you will actually feel undressed unless you are wearing your hearing aids. You realize just how much your hearing aids help you successfully cope in the hearing world. Without realizing it, you and your hearing aids have become close friends indeed!

This could be you! Read “Becoming Friends with Your New Hearing Aids” here.

A man explained,

I have total loss of hearing in my right ear (treated acoustic neuroma) and moderate hearing loss in my left ear. I wear a BTE hearing aid in my left ear. Can you come up with some type of system that would enable me to hear my wife’s soft voice without constantly asking her to repeat herself when we are out together in the car.

I understand your situation. I can’t hear my wife in the car either. Since you are deaf in your right ear, your left ear has to do all the work. This results in two problems when you are driving. The first problem is what we call the “head shadow” effect. This is where your head effectively blocks most of the sound from your wife as it has to travel around your head to reach your opposite ear. Second, since your left hearing aid is beside the window, it picks up traffic and road noise better than your wife’s voice, which further exacerbates the situation.

Fortunately, there is a easy, and relatively cheap, solution to your problem. It works great for me, and should work great for you too. Here’s what I do.

I use a PockeTalker, lapel microphone. and either a neckloop or earbuds. The PockeTalker is a small portable personal amplifier. I normally put it in the cup holder between the front seats. To use it, I unplug the microphone that comes with the PockeTalker, and plug in the semi-directional lapel microphone I love. This microphone comes with an alligator clip that my wife clips to her collar or clothes close to her mouth.

To hear via the PockeTalker, I have two choices, depending whether I choose to wear my hearing aids or not. If I choose to wear my hearing aids, I plug a neckloop into the earphone jack on the PockeTalker, put it around my neck, switch my hearing aids to their T-coil mode and hear her voice loud and clear that way.

If I choose not to wear my hearing aids, I just plug the PockeTalker’s ear buds into the earphone jack instead of the neckloop, turn it on and adjust the volume for my wife’s voice. Now I can hear almost everything she says with little trouble. Both ways work great.

The same system also works great in noisy restaurants, or anywhere you and your wife are seated either beside each other, or across from each other.

Besides hearing my wife loud and clear, the good news is that this system doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg either!

Here is the link to the PockeTalker and accessories page. The PockeTalker is shown at the top of the page. The neckloop I recommend (NKL 001) is the 8th picture down, and directly below it is the Lapel microphone (MIC 054).

This is all you need for your application. Try it and see if you don’t love this solution as much as I do.

A mother wrote,

My 3 year old daughter has profound hearing loss in both ears. She is currently using digital hearing aids and has therapy regularly. Lately, we have discovered that she has lost more hearing in her right ear, and has stopped responding on that side.

I am at a total loss on how to proceed at this point. Her lack of hearing has now affected her speech. I’ve read about cochlear implants, but I am not sure if CIs would be a good option, or even whether she would be eligible for a CI.

You have written that you have a severe loss, but in spite of that, you went to school and earned a couple of doctorates. Please teach me what I can do to make my child’s life better. I want her to have a future.

Of course you want your daughter to have a future, and with a caring mother like you, she will have!

The first thing you should do is check out whether you can get a more powerful hearing aid for her right ear if that will help. If not, since she has a profound hearing loss in her left ear, and hears little or nothing in her right ear, she is very likely a suitable candidate for a cochlear implant. This is something you should investigate now while the hearing regions in her brain are still “plastic”. If she gets a CI soon enough, she will likely develop her hearing (vocabulary) and speech almost normally.

In the meantime, you can teach her how to successfully cope with her hearing loss. There are many coping strategies. One important coping strategy, and one I used all though school, is speechreading (previously called lipreading). I learned to speechread on my own by always watching the faces of whomever was speaking, whether my parents, siblings, friends, classmates, teachers, etc. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on the floor staring up at people—trying to speechread what they were saying.

To make speechreading possible, when you talk to her, always get close—within a couple of feet—face her and speak slowly and clearly so she can speechread you. Make sure that anyone talking to her does the same. She needs to see what they are saying.

Don’t expect her to hear/understand you if you are close and facing her. It is also important to have adequate light when you are talking with her so she can clearly see to speechread. Obviously, talking to her in the dark is out.

Another coping strategy I used was reading. I was a voracious reader and used to read 3 full-length books a day PLUS do my homework all through middle and high school. That way I learned a lot from books that helped make up for the things I missed in school and in social situations. (My hard of hearing daughter was also a voracious reader while she was growing up.)

You also should investigate the many devices that are available to help her hear better, and the devices that can warn her about things going on around her (fire alarm, doorbell, phone, etc.) Assistive devices can generally either work alone, or with the t-coils on her hearing aids. Such devices are most useful in difficult listening situations such as in noisy places, or when she is at some distance from the speaker.

One short, easy-to-read book that will help get you started in the right direction is Talking with Hard of Hearing People—Here’s How to Do It Right!

A concerned mother asked:

Our audiologist has said our 6- year-old daughter might benefit from using an FM receiver in the classroom since she is almost deaf in one ear. My husband and I are unsure if this is a wise course. If we introduce hearing devices early in her physical development (she is only in Grade 1), are we preventing her brain from learning to compensate for hearing loss in one ear? Will we make her dependent on a device unnecessarily, or are we sparing her from years of frustration and lost learning opportunities? Thank you so very much for your advice.

If your daughter had a bad eye, would you prevent her from wearing glasses so she could learn to live with the good eye compensating for the bad one, or would you have her wear glasses to help her see the best she can, even though she would be dependent on glasses for the rest of her life?

I think you know the answer. The same applies to ears. Let her use any and all devices that help her hear better, and thereby avoid making things unnecessarily hard for her. It is hard enough coping as it is when you only hear in one ear.

In fact, several studies have shown that children with single-sided deafness do poorer academically in the classroom than their hearing peers. Thus you want to get her all the help you can so she can perform at her real “mental” level, rather than at her lower “hearing” level.

She will have plenty of opportunities to learn how to cope with single-sided deafness in her everyday life. For example, if she sleeps with her bad ear up, she won’t hear the alarm clock, or you calling her to wake up. If she learns to sleep on her other side with her bad ear in the pillow, then she will be able to hear anytime in the night with her good ear.

When riding in the car, she should sit with her good ear towards the center of the car—not to the window. This way she will be much better able to hear what people are saying in the car. Similarly, when walking with friends, she should walk to the left of her friends (assuming her left ear is her deaf ear) so her good (right) ear is towards them. Little things like this can make all the difference in her ability to hear and understand in everyday situations.