For people who are experiencing hearing loss, hearing aids can be extremely beneficial. With a good and well-adjusted hearing aid, you might find that many tasks and situations in everyday life become significantly easier to handle and less stressful.
Hearing aids also have the potential to help mitigate or resolve tinnitus, and it’s even known that hearing correction by hearing aids can help to prevent memory loss and other cognitive issues from developing over time. Hearing aids aren’t the kinds of things that you can just purchase and fit on your own, however. They require professional fitting and fine-tuning by a licensed and skilled audiologist.
You might be wondering why it’s necessary to get your hearing aids fitted by an audiologist. If so, here’s a rundown of some of the key reasons.
Your audiologist will be able to fine-tune your hearing aid appropriately
When you consult with an audiologist, they will naturally conduct a variety of different tests in order to assess the current state of your hearing and to work out – precisely – how you might be experiencing hearing loss, and which frequencies may be most affected.
In order to do this, audiologists will use a variety of different tools and approaches, ranging from getting you to listen to tones from a machine and point out which you can hear, to seeing how eyes track a light under particular circumstances.
A hearing aid isn’t just a device to make all sounds around you louder. Hearing loss tends to affect particular frequencies of sound at different rates, and in order to ensure that you are able to experience the most natural and beneficial hearing correction, it’s important to have your hearing aid fine-tuned appropriately.
Your audiologist will be able to carefully set your hearing aid to properly magnify particular frequencies of sound, but not others, so as to enable you to achieve the greatest benefit from the device.
Your Audiologist Will Help You to Become Familiar with Your Hearing Aid
In addition to fine-tuning the settings for your hearing aid so that they work for you as well as possible, your audiologist will also help you to become familiar with your hearing aid and with it’s various settings – and, importantly, they will also help you to become familiar with putting it in and taking it out.
Today, there are a wide range of different hearing aids on the market, and many of them will differ somewhat in terms of the kinds of features they have – and in how they should be cared for.
In order to ensure that you are able to begin using your hearing aid immediately, with as little stress and difficulty as possible, it’s a very good idea to have a solid baseline level of understanding of how to use your hearing aid and what to expect from it.
Along with fine-tuning your hearing aid, your audiologist should help you to put it in and take it out several times so that you can familiarize yourself with the process, and so that the audiologist themselves can help to correct you with regards to anything you might be doing wrong.
A Hearing Aid Fitting Will Be a Great Opportunity for You to Ask Questions
If you’re starting to wear a hearing aid for the first time – or if you’re moving over to a new hearing aid – there’s a good chance that you will have a number of questions on your mind that you’d like to have resolved.
While there are many resources online that may be useful for new hearing aid owners, this abundance of information can also end up feeling overwhelming – and it can be difficult to tell which information is coming from reliable sources and which isn’t.
When your audiologist is fitting you with your new hearing aid, you will be able to ask any questions that you have and you will be able to discuss things in detail.
It might be, for example, that you’re wondering about how you should clean your hearing aid, or what you should do if your hearing aid appears damaged in a particular way. Or, maybe, you’re just curious about how your experience of wearing a hearing aid is likely to change over time as you become more used to it.
Even before you’ve actually got a hearing aid that you’re about to have fitted, your audiologist will be able to talk you through the different hearing aid options on the market, so that you can get one which is as well-suited to your lifestyle as possible. If you do a lot of physical activities, for example, your hearing aid needs will likely be different.
Two Rivers Hearing is here to help you with all things related to hearing aids! Our office number is (321) 499-2488.
