Alright! Let’s talk hearing aids.
Essentially, a hearing aid amplifies sounds that the wearer would not typically be able to hear. The sound waves enter the aid through the microphone, at which point they are converted into electrical signals (don’t get hung up on this part, it’s just part of how the aid deals with sound), and those electrical signals are sent on over to the amplifier. Now, this is the part where the severity/type of hearing loss one has comes into play. For instance, I have lost more low tones than high ones, so were I to wear a hearing aid, it would amplify those lower pitched sounds more, catering to my ear’s needs. And from the amplifier, the sounds are sent to the speaker, which sends them straight to the ear. At this point, the sound causes tiny hairs inside your ear to move, sending signals into your auditory nerve inside your inner ear.
Now, let’s talk problems with hearing aids.
First, hearing aids do not give you normal hearing. They come with unwanted background noise, annoying static, and can cause you to feel like your ear is plugged up and like your own voice is too loud. This causes many people (including myself) to not like wearing hearing aids.
Second, hearing aids don’t work for everyone’s hearing loss. They, apparently, work best for sensorineural loss (which happens in the middle ear), though they can work for people with other types of loss (I have inner ear nerve damage, and for a while, before my loss became too profound, an aid worked fine).
Third, there is a massive stigma against hearing aids. Massive. I’m not exaggerating. Hearing aids are not glamorized, they are advertised to be “invisible” and one of the most important things many audiologists stressed to me was “no one will even know it’s there” because apparently it is something to be ashamed of. I’m here to tell you, it’s not, but I won’t rant too much on this, just know that I refused to wear a hearing aid for several years of my life when I should have, and when it would have greatly benefited me, simply because I was embarrassed and ashamed of having hearing loss.
Fourth, and finally, hearing aids cost too much and there isn’t enough health care coverage for them. There, I said it. Insurance companies won’t pay for these devices, 9 times out of 10, and in all honesty, most people can’t afford to drop several thousand dollars on hearing aids, plus the fees to have it fit and set up for the wearer’s personal needs. It’s absurd, and it makes me angry that so many people who would benefit so much from being able to afford a hearing aid are blocked from them because of high cost. Oticon, Phonak, Siemens, ReSound, and a couple other companies hold a strong monopoly on the hearing device market, and by god do they flaunt that power. In 2008, a single hearing aid cost my parents $2000. In 2015, the ‘best of the best’ aids can run higher in the $3,000-$4,000 area. This keeps many people from buying aids, and that is, to me, sad. Hearing aids need to become more accessible to all who want them for their hearing loss, and they need to focus more on making the aids help people hear more effectively, not on making them smaller and more invisible.
Anyway, I hope I effectively explained how hearing aids work, and also that you now know a bit more about them and how they affect the HoH and d/Deaf community.