What is the Story with “Free” Hearing Tests?
More than once I’ve had to answer the question of why we bill insurance for hearing tests when other places do it for free. As audiologists, our license allows us to do full diagnos- tic hearing testing to evalu- ate the type and degree of hearing loss. We use sev- eral different tests to give…
The Widex Clear has been released to the US market
The new Widex Clear hearing aid has been fit on patients in Europe for months and the reviews are sounding great! Because the hearing aid has a sound generating feature called Zen, Widex had to get approval from the FDA before releasing it to the U.S. market. The new technology includes a sound softening feature…
Importance of Good Staff
Answering Machine with Slow Speech
Understanding the name and phone number of a caller is very difficult for hearing impaired people. My patients also say that it is very difficult to under- stand information left on their answering machines. If only people would speak more slow- ly! Now there is a solution to that problem – an answering ma- chine…
Denial of hearing loss
Many people who come into my office for their first hearing test don
Captioned movies in local theaters
For those deaf and hard of hearing people who have given up going to the movies there is a new movement gaining traction (hopefully) to help you out.
Benefits of Binaural Amplification
Many years ago it was com- mon for people to be fit with one hearing aid even if they had loss in both ears. Then in the 1980’s a study came out of the Veteran’s Administration showing the unaided ear loses its ability to discriminate speech likely due to auditory deprivation. Today two hear- ing…
Ear candling is ineffective and potentially dangerous.
Proponents of ear candling say that if you place a special lit candle at the opening of the ear canal, the vacuum created will pull earwax out of the ear, help clear your sinuses, alleviate pain, etc.
Proposed tax credit for hearing aid purchases.
The audiologists at Valley Audiology are members of the American Academy of Audiology (AAA).
How long do hearing aids last?
We tell our patients that their hearing aids should last between five and seven years.