“Hearing aids aren’t the whole solution,” notes Briar
Reppenhagen-Hull, AuD, of The Hearing Care Center. “Because we don't really
hear in our ears, but in the brain, patients must also work on their listening
ability.”
Not all of the evolutions in hearing correction technology
revolve around instrumentation. The Hearing Care Center now offers patients an aural
rehabilitation program designed to help hearing aid users get the most from
their new devices.
“People with hearing loss aren’t used to hearing normal
background noise," Dr. Reppenhagen-Hull confirms, “and their brain loses
the ability to filter things out. When hearing instruments are introduced,
people with hearing loss need to retrain their brain to accept a broader
spectrum of sound.”
Hearing aids are designed to get the sound into the ear
and to the brain; however, what the brain does with that sound is not going to
be a function of the hearing aid. Oftentimes, new hearing aid wearers are not
able to adjust to the new sounds they are hearing and they end up returning
their hearing aids.
Says Dr. Reppenhagen-Hull, “That is why we now offer the
LACE program from Neurotone to help people retrain their mind for listening
through a hearing aid.”
The LACE advantage
LACE is an acronym for Listening And Communication
Enhancement. Conceived by leading audiologists at the University of California
at San Francisco, LACE is an interactive computerized aural rehabilitation
program that helps people who live with some degree of hearing loss to increase
their listening skills by up to forty percent. Just as physical therapy can
help rebuild muscles and adjust movements to compensate for physical weakness
or injury, LACE can develop skills and strategies that can help compensate for
those situations when hearing is inadequate.
While LACE can help anyone who would like to improve their
listening skills, the program has been proven to help hearing aid users become
more comfortable hearing the new sounds their hearing instruments bring. No
matter how sophisticated a hearing aid may be, most people will not achieve maximal
communication skills without some kind of training.
“We offer the program on CD
and
DVD,” Dr. Reppenhagen-Hull emphasizes, “so now patients can use
it on their television as well as their computer. It’s a great program, and
we’re very excited to offer it to our patients so they can take full advantage
of their hearing devices.”