Getting Hearing Aids

Seeing a Professional

Good health practice requires that a person with a hearing loss have a medical evaluation by a licensed physician before purchasing a hearing instrument. This physician can refer you to a Hearing Care Professional for a hearing instrument evaluation.

If you suspect a hearing loss, you can consult the following Hearing Care Professionals:

The Hearing Evaluation

A hearing evaluation will help to determine if you have a hearing loss, the degree and type of your particular hearing loss. Only then can an appropriate treatment be recommended. The Hearing Care Professional will examine your ears for possible physical causes like excessive wax build-up, infection, or growth. A hearing evaluation also includes an audiogram. An audiogram will measure your ability to detect sounds at various frequencies or pitches. It takes about an hour. It doesn't hurt and will help a Hearing Care Professional find a solution to suit your particular hearing needs.

The Ear Impression

Many hearing instruments are custom-made to fit your ears. Your Hearing Care Professional custom fits hearing instruments by making an impression of your ear, which is an exact duplicate of the contours of your ears. The Hearing Care Professional sends the impression to hearing aid manufacturers such as Siemens to make your hearing aid. At Siemens, impressions of your ears are carefully replicated for the best fit possible.

The Fitting

Your audiogram and your own comments about how well you can hear in a variety of listening environments help determine the optimum setting for your hearing aids. Increasingly, the Hearing Professional performs this adjustment with a computer.

Your Hearing Care Professional adjusts hearing instruments by taking measurements to check how well you can hear. They teach you to operate the hearing instruments, and how to hear best in different environments.

Your part is to wear your new hearing instruments for a few days in your regular surroundings. You may even want to keep a diary to record your impressions of the sounds you hear. Based upon how well you can hear in your everyday surroundings, your Hearing Health Care Professional may make additional adjustments to your hearing instruments if necessary. They may also offer tips for communicating while wearing hearing instruments, encourage you to practice inserting and removing the hearing instruments, and instruct you in cleaning and caring for your hearing instruments as well as proper battery use.

Adjusting to Your Hearing Instruments

It is important to understand that learning to listen with hearing instruments takes time and a degree of patience in the beginning. You may need to learn to filter out unwanted sounds, just as you used to do with normal hearing. It's also important to be realistic and not to expect 100-percent hearing in every situation.

It may be necessary to return to the Hearing Care Professional for one or more adjustments of your hearing instruments. Also, the help hearing instruments give you can be greatly enhanced if they are used with Hearing Support Systems and Accessories such as amplified telephones, alarm/alert devices, infrared listening systems and personal communicators so that you can hear clearly or be alert in almost every situation.

The goal of hearing instruments and support devices is to help you obtain the best hearing possible in most situations given the conditions of your impairment.

Contact a Local Hearing Care Professional

Talk to a Hearing Care Professional about getting a complete hearing evaluation. To find one in your area, enter your ZIP code into our search page.