There’s a pocket of air sealed in the inner ear. Rapid change in temperature can equal a painful change in airpressure. This change is pressure can be very painful if you are congested because the eustachian tubes (which regulate the pressure) get blocked. Keep you ears and head covered when you head out into a Canadian winter. If you do get an ear ache, deal with it the same way as on a plane: yawning, chewing hard, swallowing, and warm compresses.
Category Archives: Audiology Posts
Post directly regarding audiology, balance, and overall hearing health.
Room Acoustics and Hearing Aids
Often, after being fit with a new hearing aid, people are surprised and frustrated that they cannot hear their television or radio better or they are lost in a crowded room setting. They arrive back in their hearing clinic asking for their new hearing aid(s) to be changed and reprogrammed for this sole purpose. As clinicians, we discuss with the client that amplification is not the only step that must be taken in order for these situations to be clearer. One must also consider their room acoustics in order to have the most benefit from their aids.
Some of the first items that must be considered are the overall layout of the room and its furnishings. The sound that you hear in any room is made up of two different types of sound, direct sound that goes directly from the source to your ears, and reflected sound that bounces off the walls, ceiling, floor, furniture and windows before some of it reaches your ears. Reflected sounds can add spaciousness to your overall listening experience, adding fullness when watching television or movies. This sound for the hard of hearing person, however, can take away from their understanding of the sound as they need as much of the information as possible.
Speech is a complex sound that does not happen over only one frequency. As individuals we require the full spectrum of frequencies, from low to high, for intelligibility, loudness, and quality. If a room is badly planned, we lose certain frequencies due to exterior noise and reflection and therefore lose our ability to fully understand what is being said. Hearing aids are designed with directional microphones and noise reduction that helps immensely with this, but they may not be enough. If you are watching television in a room with hardwood flooring, non covered windows and a high ceiling, the aids can only work to amplify the sound, but suffer as your natural ears would to get enough direct sound for comprehension.
Some solutions could be to watch television or listen to the radio in a room that has a rug or carpet, cover your windows with drapes and to move the television or yourself closer. Placing bookcases filled with books in the same room can diminish the amount of sound that bounces off the hard surfaces of the room. In the end, if redesigning is not an option, the use of an Assistive Listening Device for the television is highly recommended. Used with your aids, you will get nothing but direct sound to your ears and will have a greater understanding of what is being said.
If you are attending a meeting or party in a larger room with many people, you often get drowned in noise versus clarity. What we have to take into account is where you are standing and what the room looks like. If you stand directly in the middle of the room, with several people around you, you are not going to have an easy time. Though the hearing aids are equipped with noise reduction and directional microphones, there is too much reflective sound all around you, not just behind. It is important to accept that hearing aids help, but you must make some changes as well. Pulling someone off to the side, away from the main noise will help you understand them much better. Preferably near a wall, as there will be less reflective sound. This reflective sound issue is the reason so many people have issues hearing in their place of worship. Most of these buildings are designed to be grand with large ceilings and lots of room, which makes for very little direct sound.
At the Advanced Group of Hearing Clinics, we understand what may need to change in your environment, and would be more than happy to discuss options with you.
-Angie Prudhomme, HIS
(613) 728-4327
Wear Your Hearing Aids…no seriously
As a clinician, I am responsible for helping you choose the proper technology for your hearing loss. It is my job to ensure that the technology chosen is set specifically for your needs and that your hearing and ears are healthy. I am expected to follow up with you and complete the proper paperwork so that you get back refunds and grants. The most important part of my job, though? Ethically, it is to let you know what will happen with your hearing if you do not wear your hearing aids.
The technical term for the process of your hearing getting worse if you do not stimulate the auditory pathway is AUDITORY DEPRIVATION. This means that you are starving your brain for sound and the brain is not being stimulated the way it should. Your brain will, inevitably, get lazy and your hearing will continue to decrease. The worst part being that with your hearing , your understanding of speech can also decline. That’s the saddest issue of hearing loss in my opinion. Yes, it is very important to hear sounds, especially for localization, but speech enhances our quality of life. It is important to maintain a good word recognition score so that you will be able to hear your grandchildren, friends, family, lectures, television, etc. If you only wear your hearing aid sparsely, you are not consistently stimulating your brain and you may end up sitting away from the crowd because you cannot understand anyone.
Other issues arise as well. If you do not bombard your brain with the hearing aids, your brain will never get used to them. It is like this with most things, your brain has to acclimatize itself to the new technology and adapt. If you only wear them once a week, the sound quality will be off every time. They may sound too loud, create an echo, or you may find that you cannot understand people because your brain cannot adapt to hearing aids in hours, it takes days, weeks, sometimes even months. Every brain is different, and there is no actual “normal” amount of time for adaptation.
Often I hear from people that they are worried that if they wear hearing aids, they will become dependent on them, or that their hearing will decrease even further. Let’s look at the latter first, your hearing will stabilize with hearing aids. The reason that your hearing decreases over time without the use of amplification is your auditory pathway is not being stimulated. With the use of aids, we give that pathway a workout and make it stronger. Another way to look at it is like a bad shoulder. If you hurt your shoulder, it is highly advisable that you move it, or work it out, otherwise it will get very stiff and will be much harder to deal with if it has not been moved. The brain and the auditory pathway are the same. Hearing aids are like a workout to make them stronger so they work to the best of their ability.
Similarly, if you choose to put off attaining hearing aids for many years, you will have poorer outcomes as the auditory system becomes less and less activated and the auditory nervous system degenerates. Do not wait until you NEED hearing aids, let the clincian, your friends and your family guide you to your decision. Hearing aids can only help when you have the available neural material to help you hear better and adapt more quickly.
Are you going to be dependent on your hearing aids? To a certain degree, yes, you ,will. Very much like glasses, we adapt to having hearing aids, because they make us better. Glasses help us see; the people who wear them, need them in order to function day to day. Hearing aids are the same. We get used to having them and they become a part of our daily routine. Like glasses, however, you do not HAVE to wear them every hour of the day, you can give yourself a rest every now and then for a couple of hours.
My final thought is this: You paid good money for your hearing aids and it would be an awful shame to waste that money. If you are having issues, come and see us at one of our locations, either 1663 Carling Ave or 296 Metcalfe Street, and let us help you. That’s our job. You are not being a bother or a nuisance, we only want our patients to be successful, no matter how often we have to see them.
-Angie Prudhomme, HIS and Sean Lennox, Audiologist
(613)728-4327
