Hello! As others have mentioned, you'll find some good and some bad information and a similar range of opinion on the issue here. I'm hearing, my daughter is Deaf and has 2 CIs. I'm a parent who has researched the subject extensively and made the decision, but I'm not a CI user. As FJ says, you can get the scoop directly from CI users who were implanted as children: the first pioneers who were implanted even before full FDA approval are of college age. And you'll find those with later generations of CIs who are now freshmen in college, or in their last few years of high school, willing to discuss their varied experiences. Jillio suggested Rachel: she's a great choice and can talk about CIs from the perspective of someone who is not only extremely knowledgable about her CIs, but has had a device failure and an explant. You can find her account (and contact info) as well as the stories and video interviews submitted by something like 60 (or more) young CI recipients at
this site.
1. How medically safe is cochlear implantation?
If you want facts, visit the
FDA for the US as well as the
MAUDE database which tracks medical devices using the search term
implant, cochlear and then setting the time and event drop-downs to tailor your results. You'll see that medical reports are generated here for any medical issue (e.g., renal failure, death by car accident ) for any person who has a CI, that's required by law, even if the CI hasn't anything to do with the issue, and an individual's situation may appear multiple times if he has had several visits to resolve an issue, so there's a lot of manual clean-up you have to do to general true CI-generated issues.
You can also visit the 3 CI manufacturers sites: they are required by law to provide audited statistics and full disclosure on risks -- the info they provide is very comprehensive. Probably overkill for your purposes, but if you were actually considering a CI for yourself or your child, I'd also suggest you request and check the statistics of your hospital and your surgeon, as well, as we did.
If you want opinions about safety, I think you'll find MANY
. My perspective is that if you do your homework and select an experienced surgeon at an excellent hospital, both with a stellar history of success, it's an extremely low-risk surgery. I know that I take far more risk with my child's safety every day when I place her in the car, when I send her to school amongst germ-laden kids and an environment designed to foster transmission of nasty things, when I put vegetables from the store in her lunchbox, when go for a swim, and so on. None of these activities are necessary for her to live a full life. But they are all part of what makes up the unique nature and quality of her life, how she interacts with others, how she interacts with her environment in general.
2. In what ways are a person's life changed once they are implanted?
Varies by individual, so I'll speak only for my 5YO's situation: once implanted (and activated) she had immediate access to sound and within a couple of months was tested at the measured level of a typical hearing child, including access to all speech sounds, which she did not previously have with her level of profound hearing loss. With one CI, as you might imagine, she heard a bit like those who have single sided-deafness do: great in a booth, but with some difficulty in real life noisy environments. After getting her second CI, there was a world of difference in her everyday listening experience, her incidental hearing, acquisition of language , and desire to have the CIs on from the moment she wakes up until after she falls asleep has increased tremendously with two. With the access to sound she now has, she has developed age-appropriate English language skills without the need for any extracurricular speech therapy all while being immersed in an ASL environment at a deaf school for the past 4 years -- she's acquired English through the same means a typically hearing child might learn the language, incidentally and through everyday exposure. I wouldn't want to speculate on what other activities she enjoys in her life have been driven by getting CIs -- in some cases, we may have found other means to an end, or selected different activities.
3. Does being implanted affect whether a person is considered culturally Deaf or culturally hearing?
Depends on who you ask.
Being born into a Deaf family can affect whether a person is considered culturally Deaf. At my daughter's school, the children have Deaf Studies classes, and the distinctions are made very clear to them, in an age-appropriate way. Their pride in being Deaf is encouraged, and because my daughter's primary language was ASL, she is a 'native' user, socializes among other Deaf adults and children, amidst Deaf of Deaf families, and has been at a very 'activist' school for the deaf for years, her Deaf teachers consider her to be Deaf without question and support her own sense of "Deafness." Regardless of her CI. But, here on AD I've been told that my profoundly deaf daughter can not be considered Deaf until she is an adult.
4. What arguments exist IN FAVOR of giving cochlear implants to infants?
5. What arguments exist AGAINST giving cochlear implants to infants?
It's a very individual decision to make. Depends so much on the child himself, then the family, and then the environment in which he'll be interacting and the resources available.
So again, I can only include some of the issues we weighed in our decision -- it was a pretty complex process of decision-making, so I'll try to distill it to just the two most important issues, pro and con:
Pro: Access to sound during the critical early window of language development -- specifically, full access to speech sounds, providing the ability to acquire spoken languages naturally
Con: Surgery
Good luck!