How an Audiologist can Help You

Your hearing is vital to make sense of the world around you. It gives auditory color, shape and texture to your life, in the same way that your eyesight does. So why do we disrespect our hearing so much more than our eyesight?

If you had great difficulty seeing you would visit an optometrist, have your vision carefully evaluated and a pair of spectacles prescribed according to your specific needs. Why then would we even consider taking shortcuts with our hearing? 

This is exactly what you are doing when tempted by the discounts offered by a hearing aid dispenser. Instead, the gold standard is to have your hearing assessed by an audiologist, who can help your hearing health in so many ways.

Health-related hearing loss

Do you know around 10 percent of hearing related problems are actually the result of a health problem? This means that for every 10 people who walk into a hearing aid dispenser’s door, one of them has a problem that has implications for their overall well-being or respond to medical therapy?

The trouble is a hearing aid dispenser only reads your hearing test with regards to deafness and supplying a corrective device. However, an audiologist looks at the bigger picture. An audiologist is trained to interpret the nuances of your hearing test and spot certain health problems, even before your physician could on a routine medical exam.

For example, subtle shifts in hearing of low tones can indicate the small blood vessels to the ear are furring up, which is an early warning sign of heart disease. Based on those shifts the audiologist may well advise you to seek a consult with a cardiologist. Quite a contrast to just being sold a hearing aid!

The overall package

An audiologist is a doctor of hearing and can look after your ears from beginning (such as examining the physical structure of the ear) to end (advising on speech therapy or expression reading techniques) with the middle ground of finding the best hearing device to meet your needs.

An audiologist is a hearing professional in every sense of the word. Their priority is to the care of their patient, rather than sales targets or customer numbers. This means they take the time to get to know you, which matters because only by doing this can they recommend the most appropriate device to suit you.

The audiologist also takes pride in the quality of customer care and offers follow up services and maintenance for your device post purchase. If you don’t understand what’s been said, the audiologist wants to know and to this end is easy to contact to ask questions.

Whether it being tutored on how to clean your device to making fine adjustments to the programming, your audiologist is there for you. In short being in the care of an audiologist means complete peace of mind when it comes to your hearing health.