I've had mine for 6 months. I'm 63 now. They have changed my life as well. I still have some tinniness but the tech has been adjusting the curve and other factors each time I visit her and this last time a few weeks ago the sound quality got much better.
There are still places where they don't work or get overwhelmed by background noise, like at a live baskeball game or football game but I can live with that. I'm now missing only a few pieces of most conversations and music sounds better as well. I also have audio dyslexia so that accounts for some inability to perceive parts of some conversations. The HA don't help with that.
One place they work for me that has some background noise is in my car. I listen to tech podscasts during my commute and most times don't have any issues unless the podcast has problems with too much dynamic range. My car (a Honda Civic) is a 2014 model and does a decent job blocking some road noise.
I was very resistant to getting hearing aids until I read about "Hearing Loss Linked to Accelerated Brain Tissue Loss" [1] and that did it. I'm trying to take reasonable steps in diet, exercise, and with nutrients to prevent or delay dementia. Like most of us here on HN I make a living with my brain and my quality of life would be impacted if I can't think through complexity and problem solving.
At thanksgiving I was talking to my father-in-law about my hearing aids and he also was resistant. He got his first pair a month ago and is extremely happy. He is 81 years old.
My doctor sells hearing aids but actually recommended that I use one of the big box store's services. With a 12 month warranty you can't really go wrong and the prices was about half of what my doctor could sell them for.
[1] http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/hearing_l...
In other words, when one loses hearing, the culture around them fails to accommodate that leading to increased anxiety, stress, and other kinds of undesirable outcomes that are shown to impact health. It is immeasurably tragic in many ways that this phenomenon is being used to sell hearing aids and more anxiety.
I think it is plausible that areas of the brain that are used for processing sound atrophy when used less. I'm not experienced with the deaf community so can't comment on that aspect of your comment.
I came upon the article on my own. The article was not used to sell me hearing aids. But it helped me get over the stigma of having hearing aids. So for that I am grateful for having read the article and having it help my motivation. Having hearing aids for 6 months now have been valuable beyond description.
All evidence I've seen point to brain plasticity; that areas used for specific things get re-mapped to other similar functions. For example, Deaf individuals experience a strong inner voice that activates similar centers in the brain as actual voices.
If the outer hair cells get damaged, your ear can still perceive all the frequencies; they just aren't amplified enough. In that case, you're correct that boosting the frequencies back up according to your audiogram (with some nonlinear compression to account for loudness recruitment) can bring back your hearing. The same holds if you have a conductive loss (poor transmission of sounds between your eardrum and your cochlea).
On the other hand, if the inner hair cells get damaged, you can no longer hear at the frequencies corresponding with the hair cells that were damaged. The same holds if you damage the connections between the inner hair cells and the nerves, or if you damage the nerves themselves (in which case you may have normal hearing thresholds but still have trouble hearing). In these cases, even if you amplify to match the loss, you can't bring back normal hearing; hence the need for signal processing to make the best of what you have left.
modern devices employ another trick: they "compress" frequencies you're hearing less into a spectrum that's not as damaged (this is mostly done if your hearing loss affects the frequencies used for speech).
the side effect is that music i knew from before my hearing loss got so severe sounds strange now, but the aides also got a "music" mode.
This is how psychometric testing works. It's inherently difficult because in order to estimate the point of subjective "loss", which we call the "just noticeable difference" (or JND), one has to sample more in the area of the variable (amplitude, frequency, etc) that is more difficult for you to distinguish. Consequently, one will always walk away from such an experiment with an impression of having "guessed" and being really not sure if you gave the right answers. But that's because they're trying to estimate exactly that: they're trying to find the point at which you really aren't sure whether you hear something or not.
Basically this: if you guessed perfectly every time that you heard something, that would be a 100% recognition rate. If you always said with 100% certainty that you didn't hear anything, that would be a 0% recognition rate. So logically, the point of hearing loss occurs somewhere between those two extremes.
In order to determine more precisely where, the procedure has to "zoom in" on the point at which you answer correctly 50% of the time, a bit like a binary search. (Or sometimes they want 75% or the time, etc.) In any case, to do so, they need to sample the probability of you answering correctly or incorrectly in that region. This sketches out a probability curve, and then they can fit that curve and figure out the 50% or 75% point on the curve.
They'll sample using either a constant spacing method, random sampling, or a staircase method that adaptively moves towards the 50% point. The latter is more efficient, in the sense that it requires fewer answers from you, so that is what is often used in practice. However, by its nature it is also much more frustrating for the patient, because it will be sampling much more frequently in the region where you are "not sure" of the answer.
I'm really sorry they didn't explain this stuff to you, and allowed you to walk away thinking it was a badly done experiment!
If you are reluctant about getting a hearing aid, I would totally totally recommend it. It turned my social and professional life around - I was beginning to avoid conversation with certain softly-spoken people and couldn't follow arguments in conference rooms that had any sort of noisy aircon. As a Brit, I have access to free NHS hearing aids and consumables (batteries and the tiny tubes that go into the ear), which helps. I had been planning to buy a smaller in-ear device, but in fact the external device is acceptable in terms of size and appearance (silvery grey).
The device I use has an external control button (a tiny stud) which controls volume but which could alternatively be programmed to trigger different modes (e.g. noisy room vs quiet room). The fact that I almost never have to change the settings also suggests that the initial test (which is programmed into the hearing aid) was somewhat accurate.
Its been great for me. I've had mine for 6 months. They are not perfect but they are a big improvement. See my other comment above.
I know what you mean though ... especially if you suffer a bit from tinnitus, it's sometimes really difficult to distinguish if you are hearing a high freq test tone, or just the tinnitus 'noise'.
I'll re-iterate the point other commenters have made, though: even if you're not entirely sure you heard a sound, press the button. It's all useful data: if you're pushing the button during a high-frequency part of the test when there's actually no sound, that's a sign things are not entirely right. And if you only push the button when there is a sound, but don't push it half the time the sound is played, that's also useful data.
You may be interested in the "the map is not the territory" idea. "Green" is not a property of an object but of an observer, though "emits light at wavelength N" is a property of an object.
But "Green" happens to be a property of other large families of objects -- especially animate objects (foliage, certain insects, birds, and fish) and, more rarely, certain inanimate but nonetheless "special" objects in nature (features in geology; the sky at certain times; and of course, rainbows).
So in that sense -- while "Green" by itself doesn't seem to have intrinsic properties besides an associate to a certain band of the electromagnetic spectrum -- it does have a strong (extrinsic) association to objects which do have interesting intrinsic properties.
- the definition of the category (which varies depending on what "ordinary circumstances" are for the observer: people draw the boundaries of light-wavelengths differently), and
- making the judgement "this object is in/is absent from the Green category" for any given object (since our information is imperfect, and [for instance] we may only ever see an object while it is bathed in blue light).
My post was mainly intended to say "there's no paradox involved if you experience green objects differently to me: the word 'green' corresponds to a quale which isn't an inherent property of things in the universe, but an artefact of our experience". Additionally, in this comment, I point out that 'green' can indicate different qualia to different people anyway.
It may be a simplification of the article that I'm misinterpreting, but as someone who got a hearing aid in early 2016, that's not how (modern) hearing aids work.
I got my hearing tested which enabled a frequency response of my hearing loss to be plotted (my hearing at low frequencies is fine, at higher freq I have moderate loss). My hearing aid is then tuned to match the inverse of that freq plot (ie boost volume of high frequencies, leave low freq alone).
You don't actually want a HA that arbitrarily boosts 'speech' since that won't be matched to your needs and has unintended side effects (like music can sound overly harsh/bright) because un-needed frequencies are being boosted or supressed).
-- On a tangent, after I got my new HAs, I complained to the audiologist that they didn't sound very good. Everything sounded far too crisp. She pointed out that having lived with hearing loss for 5-6 years, I actually had almost no idea what something should sound like since my brain had got used to a world with muted high frequency sounds.
That blows my mind ... a bit like how do you know the color green is green. Maybe it's purple, but you have been told by someone else that it's green.
After a few weeks, my brain re-learnt what sound should sound like and now it sounds 'normal' with HA in. Without HA, everything is a little more muffled (as you would expect) and I really notice how much I used to struggle understanding people (I believe my untreated hearing loss contributed to me losing my job a couple of years ago).
Hearing aids have changed my quality of life (at age 40).