Over the last month or so, I’ve noticed that I’m starting to have some difficultly hearing people talk to me from a distance of more than 20 feet – suggesting a mild hearing loss in my right ear. I know my left ear is dead since they severed the nerve connecting my ear to my brain when I had a golf ball sized brain tumor removed 36 years ago.
I’ve been investigating the new FDA-approved self-fitting, Over The Counter (OTC) hearing aids. A few years back, the FDA made these devices over the counter in response to massive price gouging in the hearing aid market. But the bad actors are still out in force. I’ve encountered Medicare Advantage-level deceit and misdirection in shopping for these devices.
Also disappointed to learn that no accommodations are being made for a one sided hearing loss. Like a one leg amputee, the industry is forcing me to purchase a pair of hearing aids even thought I can only use one.
Interesting. I have expensive hearing aids that I bought from an audiologist but she told me I could buy one if I wished. I was willing to pay because she tests my hearing, adjusts the hearing aids, helps me with blue tooth problems, etc. I like to identify birds by their birdsong and verify my id’s with Merlin so I want my hearing to be the best it can be.
I have moderate high-frequency hearing loss in both ears due to years of exposure to machine noise.
I waited until OTC hearing aids became available (maybe there was a little denial in there, too). Then I realized that OTC hearing aids are a little like buying reading glasses in the drug store. They are generic and aren’t precisely adjusted to your specific frequency losses.
I heard good things about Costco hearing aids. For one thing, they are only $1500 a pair as opposed to thousands more at an audiologist.
I went to Costco. The hearing exam took an hour. The audiologist had a computer monitor that showed the specific frequencies and each ear’s sensitivity and loss. Each hearing aid was perfectly adjusted – I could see it on the screen as the audiologist tweaked it. Costco also provides free cleaning and adjustment services for the life of the hearing aid. My model comes with two chargers, one for traveling.
I was so pleased that I sent $1500 to my sister so she could go to Costco also. She got a model that works with her cell phone (she spends hours every day on the phone).
@intercst you’re a self-declared millionaire. Why would you buy generic hearing aids any more than you would buy generic reading glasses at the drug store? Treat yourself to good hearing. Go to Costco.
I would like to second Wendy’s suggestion about Costco hearing aids.
I bought a pair of Phillips hearing aids for $1,700 (100% covered by my health insurance) after I found out they were manufactured by Oticon, a top hearing aid brand that my audiologist was willing to sell me for a mere $6,500.
The staff was friendly, courteous, and best of all, they laughed at my jokes. I’ve gone in for fitting issues which they took care of in minutes.
Full disclosure: I had to buy a newer smartphone to control the hearing aids because they weren’t compatible with my 7 year old phone.
In fact, there have only been two downsides I’ve found since buying the Costco hearing aids:
Ms. Wolf doesn’t believe me when I say I didn’t hear her
When I play my acoustic guitar without wearing the hearing aids, I sound like Andrés Segovia. When I play wearing my hearing aids, I sound like 10 alley cats in a fight.
My hiking buddies universally recommended the Costco hearing aids that did cost about $1700 less than mine. If I lived within 50 miles of a Costco, and if I hadn’t needed a few follow up visits to help with the blue tooth and other stuff, I too wouldn’t have gone wit Costco.
The reason I’m a millionaire is that I’m fine with buying generic if it meets my specs.I don’t pay for fashion.
I get my progressive lens glasses made in China for $45 (frames and lens.) See www.zenni.com That’s about 25% of what Walmart charges and maybe 10% of the cost at the eyeglasses operation attached to the doctor’s office. Minimize the skim. You can do very well in America merely by preventing yourself from getting screwed.
It’s a low risk proposition to try the OTC hearing aids first for $250-$1,000 to see if they solve the problem. You can return them within 30 days and then move up to the added expense of Costco if the OTC route doesn’t provide a solution for you.
Be aware that speech is made up of sounds of different frequencies even if the person is speaking in a level tone of voice. The most common type of hearing loss affects the higher frequencies, which includes consonant sounds like S, F, Th, Sh, V, K, and P.
You may hear a person speaking and almost understand them. But your ears are erasing some of the letters in the words and your brain is working hard trying to figure them out.
My hearing is OK in the lower frequencies. It begins to drop off steeply above 2000 Hz. It’s almost impossible for me to understand TV programs made in the UK because my mind just can’t keep up with the accents when I can’t hear all the letters.
When you buy your generic hearing aids be sure to listen to a lot of speech, including programming with foreign accents. It’s not a question of making the sounds uniformly louder because the frequencies you are able to hear normally will make the sounds painfully loud if you turn the hearing aids up enough to hear the frequencies you can’t hear. Then you will find out whether generic hearing aids will work for you or whether you need custom tuning.
As for eyeglasses…my eyes are different from each other with nearsightedness and astigmatism as well as prism. No way would cheap generic glasses work for me. As far as I’m concerned the best use of my money is spending it on my health. A few hundred dollars is meaningless in the grand scheme of things if my health is at stake.
That’s not true, but typical of the kind of misdirection I’ve detected and encountered in shopping for these devices.
If you “realize” things without doing the detailed research, you’ll often go astray. Kind of like using “Grandma’s advice” to inform your Medicare choices.
FDA-approved OTC hearing aids are “real” hearing aids that adjust the amplified volume across multiple individual slices of the human hearing frequency spectrum. Your hearing test is also done by the OTC device, and it then produces an audiogram that specifically determines the frequencies where your hearing is weak.
Assuming that this is like getting “reading glasses at the drugstore” could cost you thousands of dollars in extra expense for your assumptions and inattention.
Maybe you need to be an engineer to understand that?
I came across this video from an audiologist claiming that not only did you need to pay for a hearing test for your OTC device, but that you’d need to go on E-bay and buy about $10,000 worth of sophisticated testing equipment to make sure it was working correctly. {{ LOL }} If it’s not working correctly, I’m returning it to the store within the 30-day refund period and getting my money back
It’s amazing what you can get Americans to believe – the guy has over 300,000 youtube subscribers.
Again, my $45 Chinese eyeglasses are progressive bifocal lens correcting for an astigmatism and ground to my ophthalmologist’s prescription. They are the same as the $450 pair I could have bought at his office if I was unaware of the level of price gouging.
A long time friend of mine is an ophthalmologist. Been getting vision exams from him for a couple of decades. Bought his glasses a couple of times, until I started shopping around and discovered how expensive they were. Now I still get exams from him, but take the written prescription elsewhere for glasses at 1/3 of his price.
As to hearing, my late wife was very happy with Costco, who was more than happy to sell a single instrument for her one ear that was worth it.
My hearing is just fine, TYVM. As long as you quit mumbling and speak up!
Hearing a conversation in a room with lots of background noise is a major challenge for most hearing aids. Filters and directional mikes help but i have yet to find a hearing aid that does this well. Lip reading is an important skill.
I have an old old friend who loves his antique hearing “trumpet” as an auxiliary to his hearing aids for noisy environments. Works great, looks waaaay cool, and sometimes reminds people to inhibit their shrieking.
My mom has lost hearing in one ear. She wears hearing aids that “trick” the brain into hearing both sides of sound (which is important for determining where sound comes from). I think the way they work is that the hearing aid on the side without hearing transmits a sound signal to the hearing aid on the side that does have hearing, and that somehow the two sound signals are combined electronically to provide the expected input to the brain. Or something like that.
My dad also wears hearing aids, but we suspect that he turns them down all the time because he doesn’t want to hear the rest of us. But seriously we suspect more because the cacophony of sound all the time causes him discomfort.
I did the hearing test, curve determination, and software process to enable my Airpod Pro 2 earbuds to behave like hearing aids. But I don’t use them very much. Only at the gym while on the elliptical. I can’t see myself walking around with earbuds in my ears full-time or even part-time. For $200-300, it might be worth trying this out just to get used to any hearing assistance? I’m considering buying my dad a pair because Apple software is usually better than most others (the app that my dad uses on his phone to control his ~$10k hearing aids is dismal), and maybe it’ll perform better for him under various circumstances.
This is one of the things that the Apple solution reportedly does well. But I’ve learned over the years that hearing aid performance is VERY individual. I’ve also learned that if you don’t wear them all the time, your brain never can get fully used to them and over time you may lose some of the benefit, and certainly never gain some of the potential benefit.
Yes. Those are called CROS hearing aids. When I had the brain tumor excised at age 32 they cost about $3500 and weren’t covered by insurance. My doctors told me that many acoustic neuroma patients seem to adapt to the one sided hearing loss and elect to forgo the hearing aids even if it is covered by their insurance. That was true in my case. I didn’t find it to be much of a disability since I only pay attention of about half of what I hear.
They did warn me to do everything I can to protect the hearing in my other ear. Fortunately, I didn’t have a job where I was spending a lot of time in noisy factories or construction sites, so the only thing I needed to to was stick my finger in my ear when a fire truck or ambulance passed by with the siren on. I’m pretty sure my current problem is just age-related hearing loss.
I’ve looked at the Air Pods, but the complaint seems to be the low battery life. You can get a purpose built OTC device for the same price ($300) with 3 times the battery life.
My Apple watch monitors the volume of sounds around me and will warn me if my exposure is getting too high (too loud for too long). It rarely has to warn me. It warned me at a rock concert I attended last year (Loverboy, Styx, REO Speedwagon), and it warned me once when I was drying my hands with one of those blower things.
You can definitely get better battery life with regular hearing aids. But you also suffer with substandard performance, at least software-wise. It all depends on what you are looking for. But like I said, I don’t think the airpods could serve as a regular use hearing aid in any case due to form factor. Everyone thinks you are listening to music/etc rather than listening to them speak.
