What do you consider "little benefit from HA?"

people with normal hearing *do* need hearing aids if they experience a progressive loss (which is happening every day with the increased useage of ipods, etc.).
 
jasin said:
Sorry, but I disagree. Like, how am I going to understand chinese or japanese if I never learnt those languages and/or heard them before? A hearing aid no matter how good it is will not solve that problem.
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But if I put in a hearing aid, and now can hear speech, I can learn those languages from listen to people speak it.
 
Hear Again,
just to clarify....I am ALL for implantation with poor word comprehension with ANY level of loss. How to explain my position a bit better? I kind of think it's almost exactly like the ADD sitution. It is a legitimate disorder, and there are plenty of people with the "blatent obvious" form of the disorder. However at the same time, there are people who walk in off the street to try to get speed prescribed. At the same time, there are people out there who still need the CI but haven't looked into it.
Make sense? Oh, and if someone has 35% and below word comprehension, then I'd say it might be a good idea for them to get implanted.
 
deafdyke said:
Hear Again,
just to clarify....I am ALL for implantation with poor word comprehension with ANY level of loss. How to explain my position a bit better? I kind of think it's almost exactly like the ADD sitution. It is a legitimate disorder, and there are plenty of people with the "blatent obvious" form of the disorder. However at the same time, there are people who walk in off the street to try to get speed prescribed. At the same time, there are people out there who still need the CI but haven't looked into it.
Make sense? Oh, and if someone has 35% and below word comprehension, then I'd say it might be a good idea for them to get implanted.
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first of all, making the comparison between people wanting speed and those wanting ci's is a ridiculous analogy. (i'm sorry, but it is.) the two are not comparable in any way. people do not want ci's for a "quick fix" -- especially if it means they will have the potential of losing all of their residual hearing.

if someone walks in off the street and wants a ci "on a whim" (and in the 4 years i've had my first ci, i've never known anyone who has), a ci center will *not* accept them as a ci candidate, so that comparison doesn't hold water either.

why do you accept someone having 35% or less speech discrimination but not 40% or less? that's only a 5% difference.

by the way, speech discrimination for ci candidacy is determined by single words, sentences in quiet and sentences in noise -- as it should be. anyone can have 35% or less word discrimination, but what's more important is how well they understand sentences in quiet and in noise in addition to single words. if we allowed people who had this percentage of word discrimination only to be implanted, there would be significantly more ci candidates than there currently are.
 
jasin said:
Sorry, but I disagree. Like, how am I going to understand chinese or japanese if I never learnt those languages and/or heard them before? A hearing aid no matter how good it is will not solve that problem.
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If you had perfect hearing, you wouldn't be able to understand a language that you had never heard before. However, there are many, many postlingual HA users that are able to understand their native language with the amplification provided by their HA. There are also many, many prelingual moderate, severe, and profoundly deaf individuals who gain comprehension of spoken language with the use of an HA.
 
jillio said:
If you had perfect hearing, you wouldn't be able to understand a language that you had never heard before. However, there are many, many postlingual HA users that are able to understand their native language with the amplification provided by their HA. There are also many, many prelingual moderate, severe, and profoundly deaf individuals who gain comprehension of spoken language with the use of an HA.
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thank you, jillio. after i told jasin that i was able to understand speech with hearing aids when i had a moderately-severe loss i was beginning to think i was an exception to the rule. :giggle:
 
Daredevel7 said:
I think 37.4% speech discrimination is a good number.

:)
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compared to my speech discrimination scores (8% in my left ear and 22% in my right) it is, but when you think about it, 37% understanding means that a person is unable to understand more than half of all speech. from that perspective, 37% is a poor percentage for speech discrimination.
 
Hear Again said:
compared to my speech discrimination scores (8% in my left ear and 22% in my right) it is, but when you think about it, 37% understanding means that a person is unable to understand more than half of all speech. from that perspective, 37% is a poor percentage for speech discrimination.
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Haha I know. But previously, deafdyke said 35% and you said 40% speech discrimination for consideration for the CI, and I just thought it was silly to have such close numbers! Hence I said that number, just to throw in there.

Using numbers is not a good idea to me. Are you saying that a person who gets 51% has acceptable speech comprehension while someone who has 49% doesn't?

I think the question, "What percentage of the spoken conversation do you understand in your everyday life?" is a better indicator.
 
Daredevel7 said:
Haha I know. But previously, deafdyke said 35% and you said 40% speech discrimination for consideration for the CI, and I just thought it was silly to have such close numbers! Hence I said that number, just to throw in there.

Using numbers is not a good idea to me. Are you saying that a person who gets 51% has acceptable speech comprehension while someone who has 49% doesn't?

I think the question, "What percentage of the spoken conversation do you understand in your everyday life?" is a better indicator.
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if we evaluated people based on this (see bolded text), *anyone* could be a ci candidate -- including those with moderate hearing loss. audis need to find a way to differentiate between those who have *some* difficulty understanding speech and those who have *severe* difficulty understanding speech. the only way to do that is by conducting speech discrimination tests that demonstrate how well a person is able to understand single words, sentences in quiet and sentences in noise.
 
Hear Again said:
if we evaluated people based on this (see bolded text), *anyone* could be a ci candidate -- including those with moderate hearing loss. audis need to find a way to differentiate between those who have *some* difficulty understanding speech and those who have *severe* difficulty understanding speech. the only way to do that is by conducting speech discrimination tests that demonstrate how well a person is able to understand single words, sentences in quiet and sentences in noise.
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True. Obviously I wouldn't trust people's judgements on their own comprehension. However, the purpose of testing the understanding of "single words, sentences in quiet and sentences in noise" is to get a measurable factor for that question "How much do you understand in everyday speech?"
 
Daredevel7 said:
True. Obviously I wouldn't trust people's judgements on their own comprehension. However, the purpose of testing the understanding of "single words, sentences in quiet and sentences in noise" is to get a measurable factor for that question "How much do you understand in everyday speech?"
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a ci audi can also get an idea of this by talking to the perspective ci candidate. during my first ci evaluation my ci audi talked to me for a few minutes without my tactile terp to determine how much i could understand. if i remember correctly, it wasn't any longer than 5 minutes at the most.
 
Hear Again said:
that's the point i was trying to make when i said hearing aids allowed people to understand speech.
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Hear Again - Clarity with HA's/CI's for the sounds of a spoken language is wonderful, however one must first learn a language in order to understand a language.
 
loml said:
Hear Again - Clarity with HA's/CI's for the sounds of a spoken language is wonderful, however one must first learn a language in order to understand a language.
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obviously.

i'm talking about the purpose of hearing aids -- not about learning a language.
 
Hear Again said:
thank you, jillio. after i told jasin that i was able to understand speech with hearing aids when i had a moderately-severe loss i was beginning to think i was an exception to the rule. :giggle:
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Nope, not an exception at all.:lol:
 
shel90 said:
The day I hear zip with my hearing aids is the day I will consider a CI but I will be just aiming for what I can hear now with my HAs.

The reason people who have different speech discriminition is their innate ability to process what they hear. My best friend has the same hearing loss as I do and she can talk on the phone better than I do while on the other hand, my brother has absulotely no oral skills despite having the same hearing loss as the both of us. I think that is why the CI works differently despite the users being able to hear at the same dB level.
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Shel, good point. thank u for pointing that out. i had never thought of that before and often wondered why/how ppl with similar dB loss had such different experiences.
 
AlleyCat said:
It's a good point. I actually was glad that my CI audi was being so upfront and honest about what she thought the end result would be for me, rather than being superficial and saying "oh yes, you'll understand everything everybody says" and so on .. Her being blunt in thinking I was not going to gain much really said a lot to me. I do talk to hearing people all day long, every day, every week (but I lipread far more than I use ASL these days) and my speech has improved, at least I think so, but I can't "understand" them for the life of me without speech reading except for my parents and my boyfriend. What you said about not being able to follow lyrics, I absolutely can't if I don't know the words, but I can somewhat if I do know the words. So I think I'm about 1/2 way in-between. HearAgain made a very good point about my word distinction scores, scoring as well as I did with no context which is unusual. So it's hard for me to know what to think here ..
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i definitely relate to u there! (altho i do not use ASL) i talk to hearing people all day, every day. 7x a week. and i really rely on both lipreading and hearing the persons voice in order to understand them. if someone turns their back, i may be aware that someones speaking, but ill hardly know a thing they're saying! i recently had an audiogram and without my HAs, my SRT (speech recognition) was 4% in one ear and 20% in the other - this was with JUST hearing only. the audi covered her mouth and just said words and i had to repeat what she said. then she re-did the test, but allowed me to hear and read her lips and that 4% and 20% jumped up to 76% and 68%! (without HAs, i was wearing headphones with the volume prolly cranked up to a ridiculously loud level, haha).
so yeah, i REALLY need lipreading in order to understand. if its a person i know really well, like my parents, my best friends and my boyfriend, then i have an easier time understanding certain words (and small sentences) that they say without having to look at them.
as for music, i always need lyrics before i listen in order to follow along with MOST of whats being sung.
that audi told me that audiologically im def a candidate for a CI, and generally she would expect that 4% to go as high as at least 60% - with auditory only, that is (not auditory + visual). so ur audi's statement about u not being able to improve ur discrimination is a bit surprising! not saying she's bad or anything, just surprising, thats all.
 
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