Lots of people buy from us online. However, some people prefer the personal touch and come into our clinic, and I think we look after them well at Blamey & Saunders. I certainly hope so. We try, and our staff are very experienced and highly trained. People  come into our clinic for several reasons – some want an independent validation of their difficulties, so we do a mixture or traditional and less traditional techniques. By now my readers will know that I don’t think the audiogram is very useful for much – other than perhaps a starting point in diagnosis of what is causing the hearing problem. We do quite a lot of other things, with speech and noises, so that we can try and understand what we might be able to do to help people hear better.  This includes recommending our hearing aids of course.   Top quality hearing aids, such as ours, are usually the solution.
Sometimes people come in to us trying to seek some kind of hearing dream – something that I suspect is better than any of us have ever heard. Mostly they are people who have had hearing loss for years, with or without hearing aids. And of course, they are very hard to help. The things I find are:  they have extraordinary expectations, but in a passive way – no acceptance of practicing and personal effort. they may have had years of wearing poorer quality hearing aids, that have trained their ears, or they have had no sound stimulation for years in at least some of the frequency range (i.e. untreated hearing loss) for 10 years or much more, and where neural atrophy has set in.  My persistent message is “use it or lose it”.  So what is today’s message? if you have been wearing hearing aids for years, and you are reasonably happy – stick with them, unless you are prepared for a period of readjustment. You might be able to do better than you are doing now, but it won’t be instant.  You are used to what you have.  If you go and just listen to new hearing aids, even with the most advanced technology, it’s likely that you will not like them as much as what you have.  But if you persist, and let the brain do its work then……….