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#1 Thing to Know About Hearing Aid Programming with Dr. Egan

Hi, I’m Dr. Egan from Now Hear This®, and today I’d like to talk to you about the number one most
important thing when getting your hearing aids programmed. That’s something called Real Ear Measures.

So, if you were to think about if you were to yell in a closet vs in an auditorium, the sound quality of that yelling would be very different because of the change in space. From yelling in a small closet to yelling in a wide-open, reverberant auditorium. Well, the same thing happens with ear canals! If I were to put hearing aids on a tiny little baby’s ear canal and then put them in an adult’s ear canal that’s a more normal size, the hearing aid’s going to sound very different. That’s a dramatic way of saying everyone’s ear canal shape and size is different and that impacts the sound quality that we hear from hearing aids.

So, Real Ear Measurement, what it is, we place a tiny rubber microphone in your ear, and it measures exactly what is happening by your eardrum, so it takes into account the individual size of your ear and its shape. That’s how we’re able to objectively measure and make sure we’re giving you all the sound you’re missing. If we didn’t so this, it would basically be guesswork and unfortunately, only about 25% of audiologists follow this best practice of doing Real Ear Measurement with every hearing aid fitting. If you think about it, babies can’t tell you if it’s too loud or too soft, so Real Ear Measurement is the only way to properly program hearing aids for a baby. Well, adults still need the same quality care, so we make sure that we do real ear measurement on every single patient on every single patient that comes into our clinic. That’s why our return rate is less than 1%, because when you actually measure and do the right tests, the sound quality is good, and the listening effort is so much less. People are able to hear the places and things that they need to. I hope you learned a little bit in this video, and of course, have a wonderful rest of your day!