My last set of hearing aids cost $6,000.00 each ($12,000.00 total). Of that my insurance paid $10,000.00. And like all the previous hearing aids I have tried, these not only did not work, but made my hearing worse.
Luckily, New York State law gives you 90 days to return the hearing aids if they are not helpful, so all but $75.00 (the cost of the mold) was refunded to me when I returned them.
I don’t know if that law will apply now that a prescription is no longer required.
As mentioned earlier, typical hear loss from aging, loses the high pitches. My hearing loss, which is nerve transmission, is hereditary or more typically due to a brain tumor. (No tumor for me, though the MRI was a unpleasant experience.)
My hearing loss is known as “reverse slope” hearing loss. I continue to hear higher pitches, but the lower pitches (with gaps) are lost.
After my most recent (and most promising) hearing aids, I read that there are fewer than a dozen people in the USA will be diagnosed with true reverse slope hearing loss. Of those twelve, anywhere from six of them to all of them will be dead within a year or less.
Having read that, I have given up entirely on hearing aids. The market for reverse slope specific hearing aids is too small for manufacturers to cater to.
In the 1980s they came out with the first digital hearing aids that could be amplified by frequency bands (just three). But they had an automatic system that used algorithms to adjust the hearing aids. These were adjusted for normal slope hearing and were the worst that I had tried.
In around 1999 I got a pair that were adjustable in 10 bands. That was the best effort, but the hearing tests showed that I heard better without the hearing aids than with them.
Around then, I took a 10 week course from Long Island Jewish Hospital for lip reading. The teacher told me that I was the best student he had ever had, but I probably will not do much lip reading until my hearing got worse. (Lip reading requires concentration and is very much like work.)
A very strange thing about lip reading is that the brain “reads” the lip information as sound. So it is impossible to tell how much of what I “heard” was sound and how much was lip reading. I assumed it was about 20-25% lip reading, and the rest is listening.
It was not until the pandemic that I learned otherwise. I am reading about 75% or more and hearing the rest. With the pandemic, people were wearing masks. With the mask on, I could understand 0% of the conversation.
Strangely, my sister had fabulous hearing. When my German Shepherd would howl over some distant and inaudible siren, my sister would howl along with him. Note: That is a hyperbole. When the dog howled and everyone asked, “What’s he howling about?” She would reply, “Don’t you hear the siren.” In a room full of people, only she and my dog would hear the sound.
It was not until the pandemi
