I have heard this mentioned a couple of times lately and I wonder if anyone has visited any of these sites where they have exercises supposed to help with hearing - I’m not quite sure how they are supposed to work? – I’m sorry I don’t have a specific name.
For those who have given these sites a try - what’s your “take” / impression? Did they help or are they mostly waste of time? How many times / for what length of time you practiced these exercises?
For those who have given these sites a try - what’s your “take” / impression? Did they help or are they mostly waste of time? How many times / for what length of time you practiced these exercises?
This isn’t what you wanted to hear but…
You have a damaged ear, let me put it this way you put in garbage and garbage out as a result… Brain is an advanced pattern recognizer and it is plastic in nature…
let me be blunt, it is a waste of time unless you have which restores clean data to your brains auditory cortex…
There is certainly brain retraining going on when you first use hearing aids. I wonder if there are exercises that you can do while wearing . In particular are there spatial hearing exercises, and does this help with voice in noisy environments?
On the contrary - what I want to hear is the truth - and opinions from whoever cares to share them. My former audiologist harped on utilizing these sites all the time. - in fact she flat out told me (after saying I was “disappointed” the day after I got new hearing aids) that THOSE SITES are where your best hope lies. WHICH is one of the big reasons she’s FORMER.
I don’t want to pay $5000 for a pair of hearing aids and then have the person who sold them to me say these sites are what I need to focus on. Of course she’s only got a TEMPORARY license a year ago. IMO they ought to warn people to not assume your audiologist has good credentials and experience to back up the license.
I would keep an open mind about these sites and try the exercises out but it just is really disheartening for practitioners / audiologists to use them as a copout in case they are not properly adjusted or are the wrong ones. Buyer Beware - not just of product but of seller.
Cochlear implants and hearing aids are horses of different colors. Which is one reason you have to pass rigorous tests (for medicare advantage programs anyway) to get them. Not saying there’s no comparison but its a big leap between an implant and something stuck in your ear.
If you want to bad mouth audiologist and fitters please start a new thread.
This thread is about retraining hearing ability.
Many of us have relearned speech to raise our word understanding. I did this successfully with hearing aids a number of years ago. It was frustrating at times but speech understanding came back to a degree. Properly fit hearing aids might sound very bad when you first put them on. It might take hours or even months for your brain to learn all the new sounds it has not been hearing.
When I got ’s it was another big time to relearn hearing. It too was frustrating in the beginning but worked out fantastic for me.
I do have experience to compare hearing aids and cochlear implants as far as relearning speech. Both can be frustrating and rewarding.
As you asked, this is my honest opinion.
Good luck.
I have a list of those sites SOMEWHERE. I keep everything - problem is finding it. If I give up and stop looking for something I know I’ve said - almost magically it will reappear. Or if I’ve been saving one of a pair of my favorite socks - the other having gone missing - the only way I will find the one that went missing is to throw away the one I’ve been saving.
Anyway - I shall rummage around in search of the list I was given of those sites and post later today if I’m successful that is.
OK, I’m no expert in the arena, but have worn aids for well over 30 years. I’ve also had to “retrain” my ears to better comprehend speech when I get a new pair of aids, meet new people, or even have a pair of mal-functioning aids fixed so that I’m once again hearing as best I can.
I think the BRAIN + EAR connection is the most powerful method for improving one’s ability to comprehend audio input - whether that be sounds, music, speech, TV, radio, whatever is going on around one.
So either component of that - brain OR ear - malfunctioning will lead to a diminished hearing ability. One has to test both hearing and brain to see what the issues are. There are issues with not being able to hear at any volume, and then there are issues of not being able to comprehend at any volume, if you know what I’m saying.
I don’t know about the exercises audiologists recommend, but it could be that they - like many medical professionals - are aiming for a WIN-WIN, and will toss out suggestions they’ve been told should, could, would work. The final test is the individual with the issue! Unfortunately, we have to be our own advocate, able to articulate what issues we are having, and go from there. That alone could involve more than one medical expert’s examination, diagnosis and treatment suggestion.
Kansas
