- In this video, I'm gonna go
over five of the worst excuses
that hearing care providers will use
to try to convince you that they
don't need to perform Real Ear Measurement.
Coming up.
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Hi guys, Cliff Olson, Doctor of Audiology
and Founder of Applied Hearing Solutions
in Anthem, Arizona, and on this channel
I cover a bunch of hearing related information
to help make you a better informed consumer.
So if you're into that, make sure
you hit that Subscribe button.
Like many industries,
in the hearing care world,
we have something called best practices.
Best practices are basically a set of guidelines
that specify the most effective methods
of administering care.
These best practice guidelines are developed
based off of evidence based research
that is compiled by a task force
of industry leading professionals.
By using evidence based research,
you largely take opinion out of what
the best treatment options are.
If you would like to see
these best practice guidelines
for the audiologic management
of adult hearing impairment,
then I highly recommend you check out
my PDF that I will have linked
in the Description below.
Yet, no matter how much research
there is surrounding a topic,
and there is a ton of research
involving Real Ear Measurement,
I constantly get emails from individuals
all over the world asking me if the excuse
that their hearing care provider
has given them for not doing
Real Ear Measurement actually makes any sense.
That's why I compiled a list of the five
worst excuses that I constantly hear.
Terrible excuse number one.
Hearing aids are so advanced nowadays
that they can self-calibrate
to your specific hearing loss.
If you truly believe that this is a good excuse
not to perform Real Ear Measurement,
then why would you even need to go
to that hearing care professional?
You could just go online,
buy hearing aids, have them
auto-fit to your hearing loss prescription
and you'd be good to go.
But even hearing aid manufacturers
are begging hearing care providers
to perform Real Ear Measurement on their devices.
Manufacturers know that one of the main reasons
that hearing aids are returned for credit
is because they weren't programmed appropriately
to a patient's hearing loss prescription.
Now, how do they know this?
Well, they can actually do data readings
off of these returned hearing aids
and determine whether or not they were fit
using Real Ear Measurement basically showing
that there were adjustments made
to the devices, or whether or not
they were just auto-calibrated
to a patient's hearing loss.
Terrible excuse number two.
Real Ear Measurement is only necessary
for complicated forms of hearing loss.
Yes, some hearing losses are more complex
than other hearing losses.
But all hearing losses have a certain prescription
that needs to be met.
Do surgeons only wash their hands
for "complex" surgical procedures,
or do they wash their hands
for all surgical procedures?
And the answer is that they wash their hands
all the time because best practices
indicate that they should.
It is the same thing for treating hearing loss.
Whether you have a complex form of hearing loss
or whether you have a more traditional form
of hearing loss, you still need to verify
that that particular prescription is being met,
and the best way to do that
is by using Real Ear Measurement.
Terrible excuse number three
is that Real Ear Measurement
can't be used for single sided deafness
when treating with CROS or BiCROS devices.
When you have single sided deafness,
some of the more common treatments
that you have at your disposal
are CROS treatment or BiCROS treatment.
Basically what this type of treatment does
is it takes sound from the side
that you are deaf in and it will transmit it
over to a device that is on your better hearing ear.
If you have normal hearing
in your better hearing ear,
you would use CROS treatment.
If you have a hearing loss
in your better hearing ear,
you would use BiCROS treatment.
The whole concept is that we're trying
to overcome what we call the headshadow effect,
which is the effect that happens
when sound is trying to get around your skull
and by the time it gets to your better ear
it's already softer.
Of all the excuses that I see,
these are some of the more comical ones,
and it ranges anywhere from
why would you need to measure
the amount of sound in your deaf ear to,
well, when the sound comes over
from your bad side and goes into your good side,
that interferes with the sound
that's already coming into your good side,
so it just mashes up the whole measurement anyway.
Whether you have CROS treatment
or BiCROS treatment, Real Ear Measurement
is the only way to ensure
that you're transferring over enough sound
to overcome that headshadow effect
and actually amplify the better ear correctly.
Terrible excuse number four
is that Real Ear Measurement provides
no additional benefit over not using them.
Alright, yes, in some cases,
hitting the auto program button
in the hearing aid manufacturer software
will give you some benefit.
And in some cases this benefit
is enough for you to justify
spending thousands of dollars
for those particular hearing aids.
However, research study after research study
indicate that performing Real Ear Measurement
when programming hearing aids
provides better patient outcomes
versus not performing Real Ear Measurement.
Take a look at this graph from a study
by Leavitt and Flexor that indicates
hearing aid performance in a background noise setting.
The shorter the bar, the better the performance
in a background noise setting.
As you can see, when comparing
seven hearing aids programmed
using Real Ear Measurement,
as indicated by the gray bars,
they all significantly outperform
the same hearing aids that aren't programmed
using Real Ear Measurement.
You can even see that an old analog hearing aid
that is programmed using Real Ear Measurement
outperforms more advanced digital hearing aids
that are not programmed using Real Ear Measurement.
Guys, the research doesn't lie.
No Real Ear Measurement equals poorer performance,
especially in a background noise situation.
And terrible excuse number five,
and perhaps the worst excuse out of all of them,
is that Real Ear Measurement isn't repeatable.
The theory of this excuse
is that Real Ear Measurement isn't consistent
and reliable enough to give you
accurate readings from measurement to measurement.
This excuse is completely inaccurate.
As long as Real Ear Measurement equipment
has been properly calibrated
on an annual basis, the results
that you get from doing these measurements
is consistent and reliable.
In fact, all Real Ear Measurement equipment
has reference microphones to ensure
that the sound coming out of the speaker
is coming out at the calibrated level
to ensure that it doesn't throw any variability
into the measurements that are done
inside of the patient's ear canal.
Now, to be fair, there is no measurement
that doesn't have some level of variability.
Let me say that again.
There is no measurement that has ever existed
in the history of the world
that doesn't have some level of variability.
The question is, does the variability
fall within a pre-determined level of acceptance?
And with Real Ear Measurement it does.
Ultimately, I find it sad
that some hearing care professionals
are still trying to come up with different excuses
to justify their reasoning
for not using Real Ear Measurement.
It is no secret in the hearing care world
that best practices indicate
that Real Ear Measurement is the gold standard
in programming hearing aids.
And this is not my opinion,
this is based off of research.
So the next time that a hearing care professional
tries to give you some bogus excuse
as to why they can't perform Real Ear Measurement,
just politely tell them that you're gonna
go somewhere else that does.
That's it for this video.
If you have any questions, leave them
in the Comment section below.
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And if you want to see other videos
just like this one, make sure
you hit that Subscribe button.
I'll see you next time.
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