Hearing Aids
“That’s right, life is much better with the hearing aids.”
In old cartoons, they show old people with hearing horns, usually an old man with a long white beard asking people to speak up. This is all the technology they had for centuries to allow hearing impaired people to hear conversation.
Today we have small electronic devices that amplify and filter the sound, enabling people to reconnect with society. These hearing aids can help you hear in both quiet and noisy settings (they are not just “amplifiers” but also filters with microphones. Modern miniaturization now allows amazing digital processing to be packed into aids the size of your thumbnail.
A hearing aid has a microphone, an amplifier and a receiver (or speaker). Good hearing aids combine new circuits to the amplifier so that only the “trouble” frequencies are amplified. Many have filters to lessen background noise ( the biggest complaint) and even have directional microphones so that you can better hear just the speaker you want to hear amid the noise.
Not your grandfather’s hearing aids
Hearing aids improve the hearing and speech comprehension of people who have hearing loss that results from damage to the tiny sensory cells in the inner ear, called hair cells. This is called sensorineural hearing loss. The hair cell damage can occur as a result of heredity, disease, aging, loud noise history, or even certain medicines.
The greater the damage to a person’s hair cells, the more severe the hearing loss. So the more the damage, greater the hearing aid amplification needed to make up the difference. There are some (very few) hearing losses that can not be treated with hearing aids. We have treated many patients who were written off as permanently deaf by our competitors. The very deaf person may need a cochlear transplant, about 1% of the hearing impaired, which we refer back to your physician.
For 99% of hearing loss cases, hearing aids are indicated.
Hearing Aids: still the only solution for moderate to severe hearing loss
Come in for a hearing test. If your test indicates you need hearing help, we discuss the wide range of models available. We pride ourselves on our empathetic hearing care and we talk price, lifestyle, vanity issues and technology with you in an open honest manner.
We sell only quality aids by the big FIVE manufacturers (Oticon, Phonak, Signia, Widex, Starkey). They offer warranties on their models and they repair them for us. We do not deal in cheap assistive listening devices (ALDs) that we cannot vouch for or repair (you likely have seen and heard advertisements for these ALDs).
Should hearing aids be indicated by your audiogram, we are a very GOOD source to purchase the devices from. We have longstanding relationships with the five major hearing aid manufacturers. We are a beta test site for them because of our history and the fact we treated over 40,000 customers.
Working with manufacturers, we suggest new circuits, we test new models in the real world, we get valuable feedback from our customers which we relay to the manufacturers’ research labs.
Parker Hearing Institute works at the very cutting edge of the industry.
This will interest you: we get the BEST prices on their high tech models, and we pass that savings onto you. These days, we’re talking thousands of dollars in discounts just by buying through us. We can even finance your new aids interest-free. It pays to be with the established experts!