People

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.”

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 (AAA) AudiologyNow 2009 conference.

HearUSA Hires NFL Coaching Legend Don Shula To Promote Hearing Aids

HearUSA, the rapidly growing conglomerator of hearing-aid retail stores across the U.S., has hired Don Shula, the legendary former coach of the National Football League’s Miami Dolphins, to promote hearing aids among active Baby Boomers.

In its second-quarter financial report, HearUSA cited the costs of the Don Shula “Just Find Out” TV and promotional advertising campaign as one of the reasons it incurred a $3.4 million loss, or $0.09 per share, in its second fiscal quarter. The company has been investing in rapid growth and said it expects to hit more than $100 million in revenues in 2007 as it continues opening and acquiring retail hearing-aid centers. The company also recently announced expanded agreements with leading managed care providers, giving the hearing-aid provider access to a pool of 2.5 million insured patients. Among the providers HearUSA has agreements with is the U.S. Veteran’s Administration. That relationship is curious given the fact that the U.S. government usually looks for made-in-America suppliers, whereas 90 percent of the products HearUSA sells comes from Siemens, a German company, according to an announcement HearUSA made in January 2007. Siemens also has a significant financial interest in HearUSA, the company said in the same announcement.

NBA Basketball Legend Kevin McHale Supports Cochlear Implants For Kids

By Jake Copithorne

Former Boston Celtics great and current Minnesota Timberwolves General Manager Kevin McHale has recently made news for his 5-for-1 NBA mega-trade, but it’s his 4-for-1 deal that’s been turning heads outside the basketball world: four cochlear implants for the cost of one. In partnership with four other board members, McHale has co-founded the Help Me Hear Foundation, an organization dedicated to granting free cochlear implants to impoverished deaf children. He will also act as the foundation’s national spokesperson.

The cost of a cochlear implant, including the required surgery, can range from $30,000 to $50,000. The necessary post-op rehabilitation can be equally expensive. But HMH plans to cut that often unaffordable price tag to only $7,000, all paid by tax-deductable donations to the foundation. If McHale could make bargains like that at his day job, the Timberwolves would have made the playoffs! HMH has the ambitious goal of granting 200 cochlear implants to deaf children by the end of 2008, and then doubling that number in each of the following three years. By 2011, the organization hopes to have provided a total of 1,600 cochlear implants to children in need.

Hearing impairment and deafness in children can cause major developmental setbacks. For families who cannot afford appropriate care for a deaf or hard-of-hearing child, these setbacks can become permanent. According to the HMH website, “At a minimum, a deaf child will not be able to communicate via spoken language, will develop reading skills more slowly, will have more difficulty understanding mathematical concepts, and will be limited in schooling and vocational choices.” Emotional isolation and stymied social development can result.

However, a cochlear implant can have a dramatic effect on normalizing the development of a hearing-impaired child. The ability to hear sounds translates into an ability to communicate orally, a crucial skill that alone can prevent developmental stumbling blocks. According to a press release distributed by the foundation, the impact of a cochlear implant can be so profound that a ten-year-old child who received a cochlear implant at age one or one and a half would be indistinguishable from hearing children to most people.

Kevin McHale summed up the importance of the Help Me Hear Foundation’s work when he explained why he decided to get involved: “Every child deserves a chance to hear. I love the fact that the goal of this organization is to create independent, productive people. It’s a small, one time, investment that will have a lifetime of benefits. The impact will be felt not only by the children, but, by the families of these kids. I’m just happy to be a part of it.”

My Dad’s Hearing Loss Is A Challenge Our Family Confronted Together

By Jake Copithorne

“I’m sorry, could you repeat that?” my dad asked for the third time. The line at the bookstore was growing at an alarming pace. Six, seven, eight people were waiting behind us now, more agitated by the minute.

“There is a special today. Since you bought six books, you can get one of these two bags for free. Which–would–you–like?” The last sentence was punctuated with loud, arrogant condescension in each drawn-out word. I could feel my tension rising to the point where my heart raced and my stomach churned. I was angry at the cashier and embarrassed for my dad. The line began to push, and the cashier was rude, impatient, and at the edge of his tolerance level….

It was Dad’s first day out of the house after suddenly losing much of his hearing three months before. The doctor said it was probably a combination of Meniere’s disease and autoimmune inner ear disease–a stress-related disease in which your immune system mistakes your good hearing cells for being unhealthy and attacks them. The disease often leads to a total loss of hearing. It is not well understood, and there’s no known cure.

The loss of Dad’s hearing was not only a challenge that he had to overcome, but a challenge for everyone in the family. I was only thirteen at the time, but I quickly started to understand firsthand how the world treats people who have disabilities.

We had to learn to compensate for Dad’s hearing loss in all possible ways. He couldn’t use the phone without special equipment. He couldn’t understand us if we were not facing him. We learned to talk louder and more clearly and how to help him when he couldn’t hear. We always put the closed captioning on the screen when we watched TV and movies. At home we adjusted our lives in hundreds of other ways, and even more in helping him deal with others….

Watching Dad struggle with the cashier was painful. He was wearing a prominent pair of powerful new hearing aids, but he still did not hear very well. Usually so strong and confident, he suddenly seemed anxious and lost. “We’ll take that one,” I said, taking charge. Dad looked at me, surprised, but then suddenly realized I was taking care of it.

This was the first of many times I would step up to help my father the way he has helped me all my life. In the nearly five years since then, Dad has started to learn speech reading and the many other tricks that deaf and hard-of-hearing people need to know to get along in the world. He has even restarted his career as a communications consultant, of all things.

My family and I met and overcame one of our biggest challenges. Through it, I learned what growing up was all about. It wasn’t being the captain of my basketball team or the best student in my class. It’s what happens when you’re faced with an unexpected situation and you meet the challenge, the way my dad has dealt with his hearing loss. It’s what happens when you stand up for someone else, not only for yourself, in his or her time of need. My dad was courageous enough to step out that day, and I was proud to be able to stand up with him and for him.

Introducing Jake Copithorne, Our Summer Intern At Hearing Mojo

The more news, information and stories we post on Hearing Mojo, the more interest there is in the site. Traffic has doubled in recent months and a lot of readers have emailed. Keeping a blog fed can take up a lot of time, so I’ve brought in some help this summer. My son Jake is entering his senior year in high school and has been helping me out. Now I’ve asked him to start writing about some of his experiences and also to help research and write news about products and hearing-loss issues. The next post will be his first. Stay tuned!

Josh Swiller Can Tell You Exactly What It’s Like To Be Hard-Of-Hearing

Josh Swiller, who started an excellent blog several years ago about what it’s like to get a cochlear implant, wrote a great article for the New York Times Sunday Magazine today that may be the best description I’ve read of what it’s like to be hard-of-hearing.

He talks about how as a child people thought he was “slow,” until he was diagnosed with hearing loss. Then after he got hearing aids came the frustration of people’s expecations that he would be able to communicate normally, instead of at best only getting “the idea of words” or a conversation instead of the real thing: “With hearing aids, I was expected to hear. But hearing aids amplified every single sound they encountered, including all the background sounds you’d rather they didn’t. All that noise, amplified 90 decibels, was difficult to decipher; voices didn’t produce words so much as the idea of words.” In school, in spite of his excellent speech-reading skills (“I became an assiduous lip-reader, and it turned out that while only about 30 percent of spoken English is recognizable on the lips, virtually 100 percent of televised basketball-coach profanities are….”), he discovers that “‘hearing’ is a fake smile plastered over a losing struggle with fast-talking kids and crowded room” and in college at Yale University he is stumped by a professor whose beard is so thick it is impossible to read his lips. There’s a lot of other great stuff in the article and in his blog. Check them out, and pick up his book, The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa, due out next month.

USA Today: How Starkey Founder Bill Austin Does Well By Doing Good

USA Today has published a wonderful profile on Bill Austin, Founder and CEO of the biggest hearing-aid manufacturer in the U.S., Starkey Laboratories. It focuses rightly on the phenomenal degree of philanthropic work he’s done, distributing free hearing aids to millions of people in need throughout the world. It also reviews his history as a super salesman of hearing aids, with his biggest breakthrough fitting President Ronald Reagan in 1983. Since then he’s fitted four other presidents including G.W. Bush who wears Starkey earplugs while hunting to protect his hearing from gunshot noise. There’s also a link to an additional interesting story on why hearing aids are so expensive. It’s the most concise summary I’ve seen of: 1) the hefty R&D costs that have to be amortized across a market of far fewer units than typical consumer electronics products reach; and 2) the lack of insurance reimbursement for hearing aids. Mostly though it’s an inspiring story of an all-American entrepreneur and innovator who single-handedly helped build an industry, then used his hard-won riches to help out others around the world.

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