Coping

Feel Good Department: Super Bowl Heroes Drew And Brittany Brees Give Big Assist To Hearing Protection Advocacy

Credit Super Bowl MVP Drew Brees and his wife and partner-in-parenting Brittany with the biggest assist of the year for hearing protection advocacy. The feel-good story of the afternoon was when the future Hall-of-Fame quarterback shared a special moment with his year-old son Baylen just before hoisting the Lombardi trophy in front of 70,000 fans and millions of TV viewers. The first question out of many viewers’ mouths was, “What’s with the headphones?” Drew and Brittany let everyone who asked know that the huge hearing-protection headset covering little Baylen’s ears has been standard issue since their son attended his first game at the tender age of three weeks. The New York Times parenting blog captured the moment beautifully, giving both parents an A+ for putting their son’s precious hearing first. Now here’s a question: who was the manufacturer of that hearing-protection headset? I can’t tell the brand or model from the pictures. Whoever it is now has the world’s most valuable product endorsement!

01/11/2009 UPDATE: This just in–a Hearing Mojo reader named bob has identified Peltor as the maker of Baby Baylen’s hearing-protection headset. Inc. Magazine got on the story quickly. Peltor, located in the home town of the Indianapolis Colts, apparently had no idea their Peltor Junior Earmuffs would be getting such a great endorsement. For more on Peltor see our previous story on Peltor’s hearing protection headsets.

Rock & Roll Icon Stephen Stills Talks About How Hearing Aids Alleviate His Lifelong Hearing Loss

Oticon USA has used the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock concert to do a nice PR piece on Crosby, Stills & Nash player Stephen Stills, who uses Oticon Dual hearing aids. The group’s performance at Woodstock was a centerpiece of the film made about the event and kept their music at the top of the charts for years.

Unlike many rock musicians whose first deafness was a direct result of constant exposure to too-loud music, Stills was diagnosed at nine years old with a slight hearing loss in one ear. In the interview published on the Oticon web site, he shares some good insights on what it’s like to gradually accept your hearing loss and do something about it. He’s also a good example of someone who’s managed to cope with his hearing loss and continue doing what he loves:

“Now when I perform, I am able to hear the top end of the music and get back in tune….Now I can hear the subtleties of the music. This has improved my playing and my singing.”

Opinion: Hearing Aid Pricing Should be More Transparent

The recent Consumer Reports survey of hearing-aid pricing and fitting practices highlighted a growing problem for the hearing-aid industry. Increasingly, consumers are starting to wonder why a few small digital components that can be purchased individually from wholesalers for tens of dollars each (digital signal processor, microphone, amplifier and software) end up in a set of hearing aids that can cost thousands of dollars. It’s time for more transparent pricing in the hearing-aid industry. Digital technologies are becoming standardized, and the cost of components continues to decline.

And there are good alternatives to the established brands now for cost-conscious, tech-savvy do-it-yourselfers: America Hears, which builds top-quality digital hearing aids and sells them online, programs them to your audiogram at the factory, sends you the software to make your own adjustments, and has licensed audiologists at the end of the phone to give you as much help as you need. All for under $1,000 a hearing aid. But most other comparable top-quality digital hearing aids still cost two to three times that much. Why? The answer is in the cost of the service required to get a custom fit. If you don’t dare do it yourself, a good audiologist truly is worth his or her weight in gold, especially if your hearing profile is complex. Getting a comfortable fit and programming assistance tuned to your audiogram usually requires multiple tries and is seemingly as much art as science. An audiologist who will stick with you through multiple adjustments is worth a significant mark-up. But it’s fair to question the value of the markup above and beyond the wholesale price of the basic hearing instrument components.

The hearing industry for the most part remains stuck in a very old distribution model which has restricted growth and shut off affordable options for a large segment of potential buyers in need of hearing assistance. Today most hearing aids are sold by audiologists who charge a single price for the hearing instrument and the service they provide. They give you a hearing test and fit you with hearing aids that meet your specific needs. Their invoice most often does not include line items for the cost of the hearing test, for the ear molds, for the hearing instrument, or for follow-up service. If it did, you would see there’s a lot of cost built into the time they put into helping you out. If you don’t need much help, they make a lot of money. If you are a difficult case requiring a lot of adjustments, they make less. This model worked well until recently. But now, digital technologies are making many more options available for people with different kinds of hearing loss. Open-fit designs mean many consumers don’t need an earmold fitting, and good digital amplification is making it possible for many people to get the hearing assistance they need from low-cost manufacturers selling direct, over the counter. One manufacturer, Songbird Hearing, is even offering disposable hearing aids that you can buy direct from their web site to address mild hearing loss, without a hearing test if you sign a medical waiver.

The big established manufacturers hate the idea of hearing aids being sold over the internet or over the counter. They would like to protect a business model that protects high margins for increasingly low-cost technologies by restricting availability to the audiology channel. That way they can maintain quality control and customer satisfaction by ensuring customers get the right product, the right programming and a good fit. They also need healthy gross profit margins to fund research on new technology, especially better software for digital sound processing. But unfortunately that business model also keeps prices high and hearing assistance out of reach for many consumers who simply can’t afford it. I’m a big believer in the value audiologists provide as part of the hearing industry supply chain. However, I think they will have to start publishing more detailed pricing for their services as well as for the products they provide. Competition from direct-to-the-consumer vendors will force them to. However, the competition won’t put them out of business, and won’t eliminate the premium end of the market. It’s okay to charge for valuable service, but customers should know what they are paying for.

And have no doubt customers will continue to spend for hearing assistance, especially when the industry makes it easier to buy exactly what you want at affordable prices. As the big established brands and new and established distribution channels offer a broader range of prices, products, services and solutions, the market will start expanding as fast as it should be, given the demographic increase in hearing loss. Everyone will win: the manufacturers, audiologists and other resellers will continue to make money, and, most important, more consumers will hear better.

Consumer Reports Survey Finds Resellers Routinely Double Wholesale Prices of Hearing Aids

A Consumer Reports Magazine investigation of hearing-aid sales and fitting practices found that resellers commonly mark up the prices of new hearing aids more than 100 percent over the wholesale prices paid to manufacturers. In a major report published in the magazine’s July issue, Consumer Reports editors followed a dozen hearing-impaired patients for 6 months as they shopped for and used hearing aids, lab-testing the features of 44 hearing aids. The magazine’s National Research Center also conducted a survey of 1,100 Americans who had bought a hearing aid in the last three years.

“Consumer Reports verified the wholesale price of several of the hearing aids tested, finding on average a markup of 117 percent,” the magazine said in a news release. “This means that there is room to bargain,” said Consumer Reports Senior Editor Tobie Stanger, who added that only 15 percent of survey participants negotiated for a lower price.

Consumer Reports also found that most hearing-aid purchasers they tracked got what it called “mediocre” fittings. “Two-thirds of the 48 aids purchased were misfit: They amplified too little or too much,” the news release said. However, even with substandard fittings, the survey indicated that the hearing-aid industry has started to overcome past problems with customer satisfaction by finally delivering hearing assistance that actually helps users hear better: 73 percent of the users who bought hearing aids were highly satisfied.

The prices of the hearing aids in the Consumer Reports investigation ranged from $1,800 to $6,800 per pair. Currently most hearing aids are sold by manufacturers to audiologists, who resell the products while providing essential services such as a hearing test, fitting, programming the amplification settings to match the patient’s unique hearing profile, and providing warranty repair service. Audiologists justify the mark-up over the manufacturers’ wholesale prices by providing service as part of a set price for the hearing aids.

More Courts Should Provide ‘CART’ Real-Time Video Transcription Services

I was excused from jury duty today after I told the officer at the reception desk that none of their amplification schemes, even the portable listening devices they provide as an accommodation for people with hearing loss, would work for me. I told him I’d be happy to serve if they could provide CART service–communications access real-time transcription–where they wheel a TV monitor into court and provide real-time video captioning of the proceedings. But they still don’t provide that service in the Massachusetts Superior Court House where I was called to serve.

CART systems have been around for many years and have long been recognized by the federal government as a “reasonable accommodation” under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). So it’s disappointing and a little surprising that CART service isn’t yet a standard accommodation for hard-of-hearing people called to jury duty.

Now that it’s been several years since the FCC mandated closed captions on regular TV broadcasts, including live news, and now that nearly all DVD’s from Hollywood come with optional subtitles, I’ve learned how much I’ve been missing when I have to fall back on speech reading and portable amplifiers to supplement my hearing aids. There are many business meetings where I need to struggle along understanding half to three-quarters of what is said. Lucky for me, I have empathetic clients who don’t mind repeating themselves, and my partners take good notes and are patient about filling me in after-the-fact on things I’ve missed. Even then, after a day of struggling to hear, worrying about what I didn’t hear, and working overtime to catch up on what I missed, I am completely exhausted. And I haven’t had to worry about whether I’ve understood the guilt or innocence of someone charged with a crime. So trying to struggle through a day in court without video captioning is a non-starter for me.

The good news is that the court officer was so understanding and so quick to release me. I was ready for a long day of trying to explain why their amplifiers wouldn’t work for me. The courthouse I was called to in Woburn, Massachusetts is brand new and wired to the hilt with all kinds of amplification, plus they provide personal listening amplifiers for people who need them. Unfortunately I’ve had long experience trying to make those devices work, and while they provide an incremental improvement, they don’t provide the kind of comprehensive understanding that CART video transcription provides.

Most likely, I didn’t have to explain myself because they’ve been down this road often enough to understand that, given the fact CART is now a reasonable ADA accommodation, it’s unreasonable not to provide the service. I appreciate how understanding they were and how quick they were to let me go, but at the end of the day my preference would have been to have access to the communication service I need so that I could step up and perform my civic duty.

It’s Better Hearing and Speech Month

Better Hearing and Speech Month is a 75-year-old tradition celebrated every May. The American Speach Language Hearing Association website has some nice ideas on how you can promote it, along with materials you can download and/or buy. Enjoy.

Back in Business, After a Long Break

I’ve been letting people know I’m re-booting my Hearing Mojo hearing-loss blog after having taken a long break from posting new entries. In the past year I’ve let this blog lie dormant as I’ve gone completely “mainstream” with my communications consulting business, Aquarius Advisers. We have been successful, with a number of happy high-technology clients, but it’s been an education in coping with hearing loss in the business world. During my blogging hiatus, I’ve stayed current with the new developments in the world of hearing loss and hearing aids, including time spent consulting with America Hears, Inc., the leading online manufacturer and marketer of premium digital hearing aids. However, I’ve sorely missed writing about this industry and all the issues involved with it, so I intend to start doing so again. I’m still managing a transition to a new blogging platform (the new look and feel are enabled by the Wordpress open-source content management system, as opposed to the Moveable Type platform I used in the past). So it might take me a while to get the new platform exposed to the search engines. But I’m starting to write again as of now. A lot has happened in my absence, and I intend to catch people up with all I’ve seen and heard, starting with my visit earlier this month to the American Academy of Audiology Audiology Now 2009 conference.

It’s Official: Bilateral Cochlear Implants Improve Quality Of Life

What people like Michael Chorost have long-suspected appears to be true: hearing in stereo is good for your health. A study by the Indiana University School of Medicine found “cochlear implants in both ears significantly improve quality of life in patients with profound hearing loss and that the cost of the second implant is offset by its benefits.”

Researchers found that bilateral implants helped people hear regular conversational speech as well as speech in noisy environments better than those with just one implant.”We didn’t know that cognitive skills and emotional issues would so significantly improve with the implantation of a second cochlear device,” said senior study author Richard Miyamoto, M.D., Arilla Spence DeVault Professor and chairman of the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. “In addition to the physiological improvements we saw in patients who had bilateral implants, we found that patients were able to function better in noisy environments and definitely felt better about themselves.” The authors of the study, which appeared in the May issue of the Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery journal said they hope their findings will encourage insurance companies to justify coverage of a second implant. Currently regular insurance most often covers the cost of only one implant. Michael Chorost, author of Rebuit: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, recently documented his experience getting a second hearing aid in The Journal of Life Sciences. He had successfully lobbied his insurance company, Aetna, to change its policy to offer coverage for bi-lateral implants. And his quality of life instantly improved:

And then I tried music. I started with Debussy’s Clair de lune, a slow, reflective piece played by an oboe and a harp. I could feel the new ear feeding me its version of the soundstream. It didn’t sound as limpid and clear as the left, but it was giving me music, mirroring the left. Mirroring? Actually, no, I realized. The headphones were shifting the sound intensities back adn forth between them, playingoff of each other.

Stereo.

And I was caught up in it: following the countours of the piece, its wholeness, its proving of the emotional resonances of sound; a moonlit glade with the stars wheeling overhead.

“It sounds lovely,” I breathed.

Wow.

It held my attention the way a good story does. I listened to it three more times, once with only the right, once only with the left, then once with both again. Disassembling and reassembling the piece.

I realized that listening to music with one ear is essentially pointless. Music reaches into you and works on your brain. To do that, it needs to work on all of the brain. Hearing music with only one ear engages on half of the brain. Hearing Clair de lune with two ears was like the difference between a live and a dead body: the form was the same, but the experience was oh so different….

It’s like cupping water with two hands instead of one. You can do it with one. But you get much, much more with two. My brain, like everyone else’s, was designed to work with two ears. Being bilateral gives me a fresh chance, after 30 years, to hear the world whole and full.

Michael Chorost has seen a difference that I’ve experienced with and without my hearing aids. My hearing in my right ear is not bad enough to require a cochlear implant, but my left ear is pretty bad. Even with the most powerful hearing aid, I can’t understand regualr converation or use the phone with my left ear alone. But I have found that even its diminished capacity provides an extremely important boost to my hearing and well being. My right ear, with good amplificatino, gets speech and the telephone pretty well on its own. You would think I wouldn’t need that second, less-effective aid on the left side. But when I take out my left hearing aid, I start to experience many of the limitations Michael Chorost experienced: I can’t hear where sounds are coming from, and I can’t hear speech as exactly as when I’m using the left hearing aid with my right. Using only one ear is very disorienting. It makes me anxious. I’ve realized the left hearing aid provides the locational cues as well as the little extra hearing assistance that can make all the difference in comprehension as well as my ability to feel relaxed in my environment, rather than anxious and disoriented. Hearing in stereo really does make a huge difference in my ability to “hear the world whole and full.”

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