What Most People Don’t Know About Hearing Loss, Part 2

The loss of one’s ability to understand words, I believe, is the biggest challenge for any patient to understand. After all, they bought what they were told was the very best hearing aid for them. Typically, the longer period of time the patient has had an uncorrected hearing loss, the worse their discrimination or speech understanding score is.

To determine a patient’s percentage of speech discrimination they are given a word list of phonetically balanced words. The patient closes their eyes and repeats the words given to them, the words are presented at what we call the patients most comfortable level of sound. The words repeated correctly are simply converted by the number of words given to provide the percentage of the patient’s ability to understand words. So you would end up with a score between 0% and 100%. In my private practices we have as many as 6-8% with 0% of word understanding. That means if they have their eyes closed and someone is talking to them, they will hear the sounds of the words but usually they can’t make out what is being said.

So should this person be wearing hearing aids if they can’t understand words? The answer is overwhelmingly YES. Bring anyone’s hearing up into the normal range of hearing and they will hear the sounds of words very clearly, and with additional clues such as lip reading they actually can do very well. Also for safety reasons, especially if they drive a car or live alone, it’s very important to hear well. We hear things usually long before we see them. (continued in part 3)

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