New kind of aid helps man’s hearing loss

By Keith Purtell
Phoenix Staff Writer

November 10, 2008 06:54 pm

— Billy Cleveland said his ability to enjoy life has been vastly improved by a new type of hearing aids he got on Thursday.
Cleveland, 69, of Stigler, first began to notice about five years ago that he was missing out on certain parts of his life.
“I couldn’t hear soft sounds,” he said. “I couldn’t hear a whisper, birds, lots of things. I let it go for a while but I was embarrassed that I couldn’t hear anyone.”
Cleveland said he purchased some hearing aids that at first seemed to help. But he was annoyed that he had to keep pushing them back in his ear. Then his hearing began to diminish again.
“I was just missing out on conversations like with a doctor or lawyer; I would have to get real close,” he said. “Oh my goodness without your hearing you miss out on so much. It’s very important. I would have to turn the TV up so loud that it would almost run everybody out of the room.”
Cleveland decided to go to a different hearing aid company in Muskogee and try again.
“I came here to Better Sound and they said they had the latest technology,” he said. “I just got them. It’s amazing. It’s everything they said. It’s wonderful.”
Steve Dyke, owner of Better Sound Hearing Aid Service, said the difference for Cleveland and others like him is due to recent changes in technology.
“The old technology turned up the volume on everything,” he said. “What we’re using uses a 100 percent digital chip. The chip responds to incoming sound in milliseconds. It’s customized to the customer and only amplifies frequencies where they have a hearing loss.”
Dyke, who has been in the hearing aid business for 30 years, said the revolution in audio science has made it a lot easier for him to satisfy his customers.
“I’m delighted,” he said. “The new technology came out about a two years ago. Since then, the engineers have been making upgrades in the software to better replicate the natural hearing process.”
Dyke said he has so many satisfied customers that he really looks forward to each fitting session.
“We put in the hearing aid and attach it to the computer with a wire,” he said. “They sit here in this environmental theater and listen to different sounds like a jet taking off, a bowling alley, birds chirping, a bowling alley, or crowd noise. Meanwhile I read something to them using soft speech. With the computer, we can tweak the hearing aid response to different types of sound.”
Dyke said customers who use old-fashioned hearing aids don’t have the experience of a digital custom fitting. But the people coming in now and experiencing the new technology are usually surprised by the degree of improvement.
“The new users will say ‘Why did I wait so long?’” he said. “Giving them a satisfactory fitting is an art as well as a science.”
Although age usually brings some loss of hearing, Dyke said it’s not the main reason.
There are less-frequent causes like disease and damage caused by certain antibiotics that were used in the 1960s.
But Dyke said most hearing loss is caused by our culture.
“We live in a noisy world,” he said. “People go to loud sports events and have loud hobbies. Another cause is a loud environment in their employment.”
Dyke said people take their hearing for granted and don’t realize that many noises are causing damage.
“More of it is caused by these times,” he said. “Most people have had noise-related hearing loss. That’s the cause more so than aging. People don’t think anything about shooting firearms or running lawnmowers when they should be wearing some kind of hearing protection.”
Reach Keith Purtell at 918-684-2925 or Click Here to Send Email

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