Chasing the glory days

It is much harder to fit hearing aids to someone who has a severe hearing loss than to someone who has only a minor loss.

Seems logical, right?

Turns out that a lot of the time it isn’t like that, it’s just as hard, or even harder, to fit a hearing aid to someone who has lost only a small amount of hearing as it is to someone who can hardly hear a thing. The reason is that the person with the minor loss is chasing after the perfect hearing they had a few years ago, or at least what they remember as perfect – whereas the person with a severe loss probably just wants a comfortable sound and to be able to hear people talking.

Why would it be hard to set up a hearing aid for a minor loss so that someone can get back their glory days and hear exactly as they want? They’ve had their hearing test, the audiogram has been created and the aids have been programmed to it. Bingo, perfect sounds are here again.

Or not!

Hearing is very subjective, two people with exactly the same hearing loss, exactly the same hearing test results and exactly the same audiogram will probably not want their hearing aids set up in the same way. The dispenser can set the hearing aids to fit the hearing loss, but only the person listening with them knows how something should sound.