This week on HealthConnections, Dr. Carole Myers, a professor emeritus in the University of Tennessee College of Nursing, talks with Dr. Patrick Plyler, a professor at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, about hearing aids.
WUOT’s Carole Myers: Welcome to Health Connections, the show about people, health and policy. I'm Dr Carole Myers. Hearing aid options and technology are exploding. We're seeing hearing aids connected to smartphones, televisions, use of smart technology to refine sound processing smaller and more discrete designs, and yet, many people do not understand the basics about how hearing aids work, the types of hearing aids and hearing aid providers, and how to get the right hearing aid and address any problems that you might encounter. Dr. Patrick Plyler, a professor at the University of Tennessee Health Sciences, is here to help us break down what we need to know about hearing loss to get started evaluating options. Welcome, Dr Plyler.
Patrick Plyler: Thank you very much for having me.
What is hearing loss?
Well, hearing loss is what you might think it is, but it's often misconstrued and it's often compared to vision loss. One of the things that many people do is they associate hearing loss with deafness. That's not the case at all. People can have varying degrees or types of hearing loss, various configurations of hearing loss, but they can still hear. A lot of folks have some hearing loss, but because they can hear some they don't really realize that they have a hearing loss, whereas when people have problems with their vision, they know it as soon as they open their eyes. People have problems with their vision, they can't read their prescriptions. They can't read their phone. They can't drive a car. People who have a hearing loss oftentimes delay getting any intervention because they don't even recognize that they have it.
What is the significance and the human toll associated with hearing loss?
Well, I think before I can address that, we need to think about how there are different kinds of hearing loss. So some hearing losses are related to just the structures of your ear, or having fluid in your ear, like when people have ear infections, and those kinds of hearing losses can be treated, and they don't need to be, you know, amplified, or people don't need any kind of help with devices or anything like that. That's what it's very important to have a comprehensive hearing test to determine what kind of hearing loss do you have, if any, what structures in your ear are causing the problem, and what's the appropriate treatment strategy. For people who are just getting older have been exposed to noise, lots of different things, like I said before, they have some hearing loss, but they may not recognize that they have the hearing loss. What we know is, for people who don't treat their hearing loss, there are some negative consequences. The first thing that happens for folks is it impacts their ability to communicate, particularly in noise. When people have difficulty communicating with other peers or family members in social settings or whatnot, then guess what they do? They withdraw, and that can lead to isolation, that can lead to depression and other factors like that.
It sounds relatively simple, and yet what we hear about is we have this explosion of options, and yet we still have a lot of people that either don't seek care or they purchase a hearing aid and it's in the drawer and it's used maybe for a day or two. How do we overcome those issues?
There's about 30 million older people, greater than 50, that have hearing loss that would warrant hearing aids, but only about 25% actually use hearing aids. The reasons for that are complicated, so it could be just as simple as they don't even realize that they have a hearing loss. They can hear certain pitches, but not others, and they don't realize it until they get hearing aids. Oh my gosh, I didn't realize what I was missing. Some people don't want to wear hearing aids. They feel like there's a stigma with aging. Some people maybe feel like they can't afford hearing aids. Ideally, people would go to an audiologist. They get a comprehensive evaluation. Like you said, there are a lot of different types of products on the market that people can be fit with. When I teach this to my students, I compare it to buying a vehicle. Everybody needs a vehicle or mode of transportation, but if you're a landscape designer, you're gonna need a truck to pull your equipment and haul all your stuff. If you are a parent with seven kids, you're gonna need a van. But they're both modes of transportation. What audiologists are really trained to do is to determine based on your degree of hearing loss, your type of hearing loss, your lifestyle, the activities that you do, what type of hearing aid, what technology level of hearing aid is the most appropriate for you.
This transcript has been lightly edited for content.
