How do hearing aids work? Are they just blasting what they hear directly into the ear potentially causing more damage?
In: Biology
Am hearing aid user.
Good hearing aids amplify high, low, and in-between sounds exactly as much as they need to make a person’s hearing normal. I have hearing loss that effects high sounds, so my hearing aids pump up mostly high pitched sounds that mix with real sound.
Most hearing aids max out at certain volumes. Mine stop at 107 decibels, which is around when sound can hurt someone’s hearing. If someone needs sound to be louder than that to correct their hearing, they need to get something other than hearing aids (cochlear implant). If real sound is louder than 107 decibels, my hearing aids do nothing. If real sound is 106 decibels, but my hearing aids are supposed to add 10, they only add 1, because they won’t go over 107.
This is good, because only one part of my hearing is broken. There are four steps to hearing: the ear drum, the ear bones, the hearing nerves, and the listening brain. My damage is in the hearing nerves. If sound is too loud, I can still damage my ear bones, and I have. I used to think “I’m broken, so I don’t need earplugs!” and didn’t wear them when I should have, and hurt my ear bones, which made my hearing worse.
Have you ever seen a professional musician mixing board, with all the levers and nobs? A good hearing aid has those same nobs, but all computerized. A good hearing aid doctor is called an audiologist, and will tune a hearing aid to be perfect for someone’s hearing damage.
There aren’t that many laws in the United States about hearing aids, so you don’t have to be an audiologist to sell them, and you can sell bad hearing aids. There are places where non-doctors sell hearing aids that just blast everything really loudly. They are not good, but they are also cheap. I would not recommend then.
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