- In this video, I'm talking about why two hearing aids
are almost always better than one.
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
that'll make you a better informed consumer.
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Back in the day, well before my time as an audiologist,
it used to be considered unethical to fit someone
who had hearing loss in both ears
with two hearing aides.
Fortunately, research prevailed,
and we now know that, in most cases,
fitting someone who has hearing loss in two ears
with two hearing aids
almost always has better outcomes.
There are a variety of reasons
why someone who has hearing loss in two ears
would wanna get hearing aids in both of those ears.
And I'm gonna give you five of those right now.
And the first one is so you can remove
as much hearing difficulty as possible
from both sides.
If you have hearing loss in both of your ears,
but you only put a hearing aid in one of them,
you are always going to find yourself
having to turn that ear towards the individual
that you wanna hear,
particularly if you're in a complex listening situation.
While this may not seem like a big deal,
it can be absolutely exhausting having to make sure
that you get the certain position at a dinner table
to make sure that you can hear as many people as possible.
Not to mention, sometimes you just can't control
that particular environment
that you're gonna find yourself in.
And then anyone that sits on your bad side
that doesn't have a hearing aid in it,
you're not gonna be able to hear them that well.
And the second reason is binaural summation.
Binaural summation is basically this phenomenon that happens
when you amplify both of your ears together.
You actually increase the amount of loudness
that you get when you do that.
Now before you freak out
and leave comment saying, I don't wanna hear things louder,
I wanna hear things more clearly.
What you have to understand is that,
when we aid both of your ears,
it allows us to reduce the amount
of your prescription of amplification.
Meaning, we can actually hit
your high-frequency prescriptive targets easier,
which may result in increased speech clarity.
The third reason is better speech understanding
in a quiet situation.
When I'm testing word recognition ability in my clinic,
and I see that when I test someone in one ear at a time
that they have lower scores.
Any time that I tests both of their ears together,
those scores go up.
This is because your brain actually gets more information
when we test both ears at the same time.
So, if you wear two hearing aids,
you're actually getting more information
than if you wear just one hearing aid alone.
The fourth reason is better sound localization.
Your ability to determine where sound is coming from
depends on a timing difference between your ears.
So if a sound is coming from your right hand side,
it is gonna hit the right ear first,
then it's gonna come over and hit the left ear.
That tells your brain that the sound is coming
from that direction.
If you have hearing loss in both of your ears,
but you only have a hearing aid in one of them,
you could potentially have your cell phone ringing
somewhere inside of your house,
but you won't be able to find it
because you need both ears to be able to hear
where that sound is coming from.
And the fifth reason to get two hearing aids instead of one
is binaural squelch, which helps you hear better
in a background noise situation.
Think of binaural squelch as the brain's ability
to separate speech from background noise.
If all sound only goes into one ear,
your brain has a hard time separating
the speech that you want to hear
from the noise that you don't want to hear.
If you have hearing aids in both of your ears,
you will be better at separating the speech from the noise
because your brain will be able to focus its attention
on the ear that has the better signal to noise ratio.
Signal to noise ratio, very simply,
is the decibel difference
between the sound that you want to hear
and the noise that you don't want to hear.
The bigger that signal to noise ratio is, the better.
If you end up getting to the point
where you have a really narrow signal to noise ratio
where the signal is not that much louder
than the background noise,
then you're gonna have a lot of difficulty hearing
in that situation.
There you go, those are the five main reasons
why two hearing aids are better than one.
Now you may find yourself in a situation
where two hearing aids are not better
than one hearing aid.
And the first one is that,
if you only have a hearing loss in one ear,
you only need to get a hearing aid for that ear.
Assuming that that ear has a treatable hearing loss,
you would out a hearing device inside of that ear.
And you would not put a hearing aid
inside of your normal-hearing ear.
And the other situation is,
if you have single sided deafness.
In this particular case, you may require cross,
bi-cross, amp-cross, or even Baja,
to treat your single-sided deafness.
Now, if you wanna learn more about these treatment options,
if that's the type of hearing loss that you have,
then please make sure to check out my video
that I will have linked in the description.
And the end of the day, two hearing aids
is almost better than one,
but it will always cost you more money
to get two hearing aids,
versus just getting one hearing aid.
But the benefit that you receive
from having two hearing aids
should well outweigh the cost
of having to buy the two devices,
as long as your hearing care professional
is fitting those hearing aids, following best practices.
That's it for this video.
If you have any question,
leave them in the comment section below.
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go ahead and hit that subscribe button.
I'll see you next time.
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