When you love someone, you want what’s best for them. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to know what that is and when you should step in to suggest it. One common area where we see this struggle is hearing loss treatment.
Why is Hearing Loss Treatment Important?
Hearing loss can dull important safety sounds, increase your risk of loneliness and depression, negatively impact your career and relationships and interfere with your sense of independence. While not every person with hearing loss will experience all of these side effects, it’s crucial to consider them. Treating hearing loss with hearing aids is one way to limit the impact of the condition on your loved one’s life and happiness.
Starting the Hearing Loss Discussion
People wait an average of ten years after their initial hearing loss diagnosis before getting their first pair of hearing aids. We can attribute much of that wait to one or more of the following reasons:
- Patients don’t think hearing loss is bad enough to necessitate treatment
- Patients get used to living with untreated hearing loss, often disregarding the difficulty it’s causing them
- People worry that hearing aids will make them look old
Because it’s so easy to reason away hearing difficulties, your loved one might not respond well to the suggestion that they should get hearing aids. If that’s the case, you will probably need to start with a gentle discussion of the hearing loss signs you’ve noticed.
The Signs of Hearing Loss
Look for the following signs of hearing loss:
- Accusing other people of mumbling
- Pulling away socially
- Turning up the volume on the TV or radio
- Trouble hearing high-pitched noises like whistling tea kettles or children’s voices
- Difficulty hearing in noisy environments
- Mentioning a ringing in the ears
If you notice any of the above signs, center your discussion around them. You can say, “I noticed that your TV is a lot louder than it used to be and that you stopped coming to our trivia nights at Society Garden. Would you ever consider scheduling a hearing test?” You could even offer to schedule their hearing test.
Moving on to Treatment
If your loved one’s specialist diagnoses them with hearing loss, your support will be extra important in the following steps. They’ll need to select the hearing aid they want, schedule a fitting appointment and go through an acclimation period for the first few weeks of wearing their devices.
You can help by joining your loved one at their hearing aid appointment and follow-up visits if they’d like. Something as simple as helping your loved one pick between a neutral or stylish pink metallic color for their devices can make all the difference.
If your loved one is ready to start their treatment journey, contact The ENT Center of Central Georgia today to schedule an appointment with one of our specialists.
