We all love a good bargain. But you need to be careful and look out for small details when it comes to your health.
The names “hearing aid” and “hearing amplifier” might seem similar but they are actually very different devices. And making the wrong choice could have important ramifications for your hearing and your general health.
Hearing amplifiers
A little device that goes inside of your ear, a hearing amplifier increases the volume of external sound. These tend to be really simple, one-dimensional devices which the government categorizes as personal sound amplification devices. A hearing amplifier is like cranking the volume up on the world.
These devices are typically not recommended for people with moderate to severe hearing loss because of their one-size-fits-all strategy.
Hearing amplifier aren’t hearing aids
It begins to become fairly apparent that hearing aids aren’t the same as hearing amplification devices when you consider that amplifiers are not recommended for people with even moderate hearing loss. Obviously, hearing aids are appropriate for individuals with hearing loss.
Both hearing aids and hearing amplifiers make things louder. The main difference between the two devices is how cutting edge that amplification is.
- Hearing aids can be calibrated for your environment. There are a number of factors that will impact the exact acoustics of a space. Some hearing aids can fine tune to these changes automatically. A dedicated device or smartphone can tune hearing aids that don’t do it automatically. By making minute adjustments to the settings of your hearing aid, you’re able to hear better in a wider variety of environments, meaning there will be fewer places you want to avoid.
- Hearing aids are specifically designed to help you understand speech. Because communication is so essential in our lives and also because of the irregular way hearing loss progresses, this is an important function. So this function has been prioritized by hearing aid manufacturers who have put considerable resources into improving it. In order to make certain voices come through clearly even in a noisy room, sophisticated technology and algorithms are packed inside of modern hearing aids.
- With hearing aids, only particular frequencies of sound are boosted. That’s because people often lose their hearing one wavelength at a time. Frequencies at the higher and lower end of the spectrum are generally the first to go. Rather than making everything louder, hearing aids work to plug holes in what you’re hearing. For individuals who have hearing loss, this selective approach is more effective.
To put it bluntly, properly treating hearing loss depends on these capabilities. Usually, personal amplifiers don’t have these abilities.
Finding the best option at an affordable price
Untreated hearing loss can lead to cognitive decline, not to mention increasingly diminished hearing abilities. With amplifiers, you’re very likely to do more harm to your hearing as the device doesn’t differentiate frequencies and will most likely turn everything up to unsafe volumes. And who needs to do that?
Currently, the only recommended treatments for hearing loss, if it isn’t caused by earwax, are certain surgeries and hearing aids. You won’t save any money long term by failing to get treatment for your hearing loss. Neglected hearing loss has been demonstrated to increase your general healthcare costs more than 40 percent. Fortunately, there are affordable solutions. Just ask us.
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References
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hearing-loss/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20373077